Poultry meat has a relevant weight in the diet of the European Union citizens, considering their properties for human health and the characteristics of the associated sectors. The questions here are to understand the implications of the most recent occurrences worldwide on the poultry sector, including in the international markets. In this context, this study aims to assess the consequences of the pandemic and recent conflicts in the European Union poultry farming. Statistical information from Eurostat was considered for the period January 2019 – September 2022 for the following variables related to the chicks of laying hen breeds (laying): chicks hatched, eggs placed in incubation, exports intra-EU, exports – total, exports extra-EU, imports intra-EU, imports – total, imports extra-EU. The implications from the most recent events seem modest in this sector, including in the international markets.
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The human diet, where poultry meat is included, influences the spread of diseases, such as Covid-19 (Abdel-Wahab et al., 2020). A balanced consumption of poultry meat has benefits for health (Mafruchati, 2020), as a source of protein (Zargaraan et al., 2021). The pandemic (re)open the discussion about poultry management (Hafez & Attia, 2020), alternative productions (Mnisi et al., 2021) and the use of different feed sources (Attia et al., 2021), because the antimicrobial residues (Hassan et al., 2021).
Another debate was about the transference of viral diseases during the several steps of the meat food chains, including poultry meat processing (Bailey et al., 2022). Nonetheless, the role of the poultry sector in the viruses maintenance (Suarez et al., 2020), susceptibility (Hobbs & Reid, 2021) and replication (Berhane et al., 2021) were not confirmed. This is true namely for chicken (Hafez et al., 2021) and ducks (Shi et al., 2020), at least for great probabilities (Kumar et al., 2021). These results contradict the rumours of Covid-19 transmission through meat poultry (Das & Samanta, 2021) and eggs (Kolluri et al., 2021).
In any case, the signs of survival capacity of the viruses in some foods require special attention. Specifically, the susceptibility of the poultry sector to diverse diseases (Schat, 2022), such as different coronaviruses (Tizard, 2020), frequent outbreaks (Uwishema et al., 2021) and potential transmission for humans (Yang et al., 2022), as a source of zoonotic diseases (Zmrhal et al., 2022), suggest safe practices (Dhakal et al., 2021). Suggest also adjusted management of the risks in live poultry markets (Guo et al., 2022). The same care are suggested for the entire poultry industry (Keep et al., 2022) and backyard chickens (Larsen et al., 2022), where scientific research may bring important contributions (Li et al., 2021).
Covid-19 created challenges in diverse dimensions of society (Fulber & Kamen, 2022), human lives (Pourghazi et al., 2022) and public health (Pramod et al., 2021). This event created also disturbances in poultry educational programmes (Karcher et al., 2022) and operators’ training (Violet et al., 2022). The pandemics are also phases of threats for the animals (Leung & Hon, 2023).
Poultry farming is vulnerable to the pandemic shocks (Biswal et al., 2020), namely small farmers and in countries with traditional problems related to poverty in some regions and social groups (Bamidele & Amole, 2021). These impacts were particularly problematic at the beginning of the Covid-19 disease (Brosch & Cartanza, 2021). The pandemic significantly impacted the egg and chicken output (Fang et al., 2021), partnerships (Nurlaelah et al., 2022) and the whole poultry sector (Maples et al., 2021). In any case, the variations in the poultry markets are not new, as a consequence of the recent shocks (Mubeena et al., 2021). Nonetheless, the impacts seem to be visible in the Greek imports of poultry meat (Stamatopoulou & Tzimitra-Kalogianni, 2022).