African countries need to implement regulatory standards to protect the growing pig rearing across the continent, according to Victor Yamo, humane and sustainable agriculture campaigns manager at World Animal Protection
As pig consumption is rapidly increasing across the Africa countries in recent years, a uniform regulatory standard should be put in place to ensure sustainable pig farming value chain for both small and medium-sized farmers.
As reported in Xinhua, pigs are one of the most widely farmed animals in the continent, providing livelihood to a large number of smallholder farmers. Due to the recent increase in demand of processed products like ham and bacon, the regulatory standards will help guide the pig farming industry to develop in a sustainable manner, explained the source.
Yamo added that such standards are set to help consumers as well to know the origin of the product by the labels on the packages, thus ensuring customer reliability and enhancing the transparency of the total product value chain.
According to the source, among the African nations, Kenya is showing a fast-growing momentum in developing its pig industry, mainly due to the entry of international fast food restaurants in Kenyan markets. Nigeria, on the other hand, is one of the top African nations in holding the largest stock of pigs across the continent.
Therefore, Yamo further said that the need arises to increase pig farming using new technology, such as artificial intelligence, to meet both the domestic as well as international demand.
Use of technology is getting popular in many countries in rearing pigs. Recently, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has launched its proprietary ET Agricultural Brain in Shanghai, which has been adopted by a number of leading pig farmers in China to achieve a high amount of pig breeding.
