Managing conflicting goals in pig farming: farmers' strategies and perspectives on sustainable pig farming in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Industrial meat production has several negative environmental effects. Governments’ agricultural policies aim for cost efficiency combined with high environmental and animal welfare, which puts farmers in a difficult situation trying to navigate between sometimes contradictory requirements. This paper studies how Swedish pig farmers resolve or cope with conflicting goals in pig farming. We have analysed the regulations governing EU and Swedish pig farming. We have also interviewed five Swedish pig farmers about their views of the different goals of pig farming and strategies for resolving conflicts between the goals of low environmental impact, high animal welfare and enough profitability to continue farming. The greatest divide was between the conventional farmers, who emphasized natural resource efficiency, and the organic farmers who stressed animal welfare, multifunctionality and ecosystem service delivery. We suggest four strategies to contribute to resolving some of the conflicting goals: improve communication about different types of pig farming; use public procurement as a driver towards more sustainable pork production; work towards improving the Common Agricultural Policy, perhaps by implementing payments for ecosystem services or multifunctionality; and finally, decrease the total production of pork to lower the emissions per land unit.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable agriculture
• multifunctional agriculture
• ecosystem services
• strategies for change

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Lisa Deutsch, Björn Hassler and Tore Söderqvist, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Member countries of the InterPig network: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.