How can the seven major challenges of the livestock industry be solved under the new normal?

At the third session of the sixth board of directors meeting of the China Animal Agriculture Association held not long ago, Wang Zongli, deputy director of the Department of Animal Husbandry of the Ministry of Agriculture, delivered a report reviewing China's livestock industry development in 2014 and its prospects. In his report he pointed out that China's livestock industry currently faces seven major challenges, namely supply and demand entering a stage of tight balance, production entering a stage of high costs, a severe situation for animal disease prevention and control, quality and safety hazards still existing, a lagging livestock and poultry breeding system, increasingly prominent environmental pollution problems, and insufficient capacity for scientific and technological support.

It is indisputable that as China's economy enters a period of transformation, the livestock industry faces both challenges and opportunities. While seeing the seven major challenges, we should also see the potential for livestock development under the prospects of large-scale agriculture and the real consumption basis of people's expanding demand for livestock products such as meat, eggs and milk. On this basis, the overall output value of the livestock industry still has considerable room to rise, so the overall development prospects of the livestock industry in the future are bright.

While affirming the overall development prospects, we need to actively and steadily seek effective solutions to the seven major challenges. For the livestock industry to meet the enormous challenges, it depends on building a new normal for livestock development through transformation and upgrading.

First, we should fit local realities and accurately grasp the focus of developing modern livestock farming. By positioning livestock farming in light of the local actual ecological environment and breeding conditions, and by expanding the channels and space for livestock industry development through specialty breeding, improved breed cultivation, and sales methods for meat and hide products, we can avoid red ocean competition, break out of the imitative, wave-like consumption model, and by satisfying the new trends of personalized and diversified consumption, unleash consumption potential and seize the high ground of new segmented livestock industries.

⟦NL> Second, increase the degree of innovation integration. Against the background of continuously rising labor costs and the low technology content of the livestock industry, we should continuously raise the degree of innovation integration. Specifically, it is necessary to raise the unit output rate and enhance unit value by improving the standardization of science and technology in livestock farming and through scientific planning and scientific breeding, thereby maximizing the value of livestock farming on the basis of unit area and unit consumption.

Third, reduce production costs. With labor costs remaining high, reducing unit production costs depends on lowering raw material costs and the costs of production scale and technological integration. As Wang Zongli said regarding material costs, protein feed raw materials are clearly insufficient, which depends on strengthening the cultivation of related raw materials at the national agricultural level, reducing dependence on external raw materials, and raising the self-sufficiency rate so as to reduce dependency; while technological integration and production scale depend on the introduction of improved breeds, the enhancement of unit value, and also on introduction and the digestion and absorption of technology. In addition, given the strategic role, development prospects and current bottlenecks of the livestock industry, corresponding subsidies also need to be strengthened at the national level.

Fourth, green recycling in livestock farming should be achieved. If the pollution produced by the livestock industry can be effectively reused as resources, it is entirely possible to reduce its pollution ratio while generating added value, and through the effective creation of an ecological chain, the upstream and downstream industries of the livestock industry can achieve green recycling.

Of course, supporting mechanisms must not be absent. Such supporting mechanisms include not only medical assistance based on livestock scaling and information platforms, but also corresponding financing preferences, industrial development preferences and local sales preference. Only through systematic construction and the realization of a new normal for livestock development can the seven major challenges to be faced in the future be readily resolved.