Due to the significant economic difficulties facing the slaughterhouse sector, the State is undertaking a method of collective action involving professional actors and local authorities to build a territorialised strategy for the management of butchery slaughterhouses for the benefit of livestock sectors.
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France has 233 butcher slaughterhouses spread throughout the country.
Slaughterhouses play a major role in the animal sectors and in the food chain in that they constitute an obligatory point of passage for livestock whose meat is delivered for consumption.
Providers of services and jobs, they are key players in the economy of French regions.
The current context of livestock sectors is marked by a more marked decapitalization in recent months, combined with an increase in the cost of energy and inflation. This situation is likely to threaten the sustainability of the most fragile slaughterhouses.
This context calls for a proactive reaction to preserve the relevant network at the level of each territory and thus guarantee the sustainability of our livestock sectors.
The minister responsible for agriculture, Marc Fesneau, thus wished to promote a territorialized approach to the management of slaughterhouses .
This approach, initiated in collaboration with the professional sectors and local authorities, is divided into four areas :
• The first axis consists in questioning in each region the adequacy between the need and the offer in terms of felling tools, both in the short term and the medium and long term, in order to then identify the axes of improvement and relevant adaptation by basins.
• The second axis aims to develop a harmonized methodology to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a slaughterhouse . The issues likely to impact the viability of a slaughterhouse are, in fact, of various kinds: health issues, animal protection issues, financial balance, governance and management of the slaughterhouse, business strategy, etc.
• The third axis aims to identify in a single document the tools that can be mobilized by the various actors to support establishments in difficulty on the economic and health levels.
• The fourth axis consists in improving the existing synergy between the various State services for the benefit of support for slaughterhouses.
This approach is therefore designed to bring together the means and skills of the State, local authorities and livestock sectors in order to identify the most relevant slaughtering models for each territory.
It must thus guarantee the development of a network of slaughterhouses that meet the needs of the livestock sectors within the framework of a territorialized approach thought out upstream.
This work thus completes the efforts already undertaken, in particular through the France recovery plan which has made it possible to support 181 slaughterhouses for an amount of €115 million with the aim of modernizing and improving working conditions but also animal well-being in within these institutions. ■