Recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza have highlighted the sensitivity of the European poultry sector to epidemics and the need to significantly strengthen biosecurity practices compliance. In recent years, interest in biosecurity has increased due to the expansion of trade in goods, food, plants and animals, increased international travel, and new outbreaks of transboundary diseases. Public awareness on biodiversity and the environment has increased and greater attention is being paid to the impact of agriculture on its long-term future. This underlines the importance of having appropriate biosafety capacity, including that measures are observed by the commodity chains. More specifically, regulatory bodies need to support practitioners (farmers and operators of the whole value chain, from hatcheries to slaughterhouses) for better biosecurity compliance. Given the complexity of the challenge, dealing with all dimensions of the production chain (public safety, economic, as well as environmental), and at multiple scales (local, regional, national and international), a holistic and multi-actor approach of the European poultry production chain is needed.
The NETPOULSAFE project collect, synthesize and disseminate the available information (bottom-up knowledge transfer) and report on the positive feedback from the supporting measures (SMs) implemented by poultry operators to support biosecurity compliance (top-down and peer-to-peer knowledge transfer). It has been designed to answer the most urgent needs of EU poultry farmers around the following objectives:
• Create a self-sustainable network of National poultry AKIS, representative of the European production systems
• Analyse the effective implementation of biosecurity practices in the different European production systems at local scale to identify relevant, tailored and viable knowledge and best practices
• Analyse and select the most effective SMs for ensuring biosecurity compliance, adapted to each National poultry AKIS
• Validate a set of key SMs on pilot farms to provide evidence of their impacts
• To widely and efficiently disseminate tailored best practices to all stakeholders for ensuring biosecurity practices acceptance, ownership and compliance
During the 3.5 years of the project, we brought together 3379 biosecurity stakeholders in 7 AKIS. By selecting and testing the best SMs for poultry farmers, we helped 130 pilot farms in Europe to improve their biosecurity. Thanks to coaching, discussion groups and biosecurity training courses, 70% of the pilot farms improved their practices, proving the usefulness of SMs on the field. Best biosecurity and SMs have been translated and disseminated through 163 resources.
