Sustainable Information in the Pork Chain

Abstract

Agricultural and food objectives have shifted during the past decades from ensuring food sufficiency to striving for food sustainability. At the end of the Second World War, a devastated Europe searched for ways to feed its undernourished population. In the European political agenda at that time, issues of food security, land reforms, increasing productivity and technological improvement scored very high. The aim was to produce enough affordable food for society. At the national levels, state-driven policies supporting the industrialization, intensification and rationalization of agricultural production were put forward with the adoption of the Fordist model of increasing wage/productivity (McMichael 1997) through American led reconstruction programs such as the Marshal Aid (Goodman and Redclift 1991; Marsden et al. 1996; Ward and Almas 1997). At the same time, industrialization – which paid much higher wages than labour in agriculture – occurred in different sectors of the economy and resulted in urbanization and rural exodus. For that reason, subsidies were introduced to keep agricultural labour from lapsing to competitive fields and secure production. The results were rewarding: agriculture began to transform from a relatively backward and highly labour-intensive sector of the economy towards one of increasing technological sophistication (Bowler 1985; Gardner 1996), while the process of business termination slowed down (Van Leeuwen, 2003).