Web platform for interacting with PPILOW European Multiactor Board

– by Anne Collin (INRAE)

About 15 members of the PPILOW consortium including work package leaders, task leaders and members of the PPILOW partnership attended a videoconference meeting on the 5^th of June where the PPILOW consortium presented its latest progress to its European Multiactor Board (EMB) gathering stakeholders and members of the pig and poultry value chains. This instance following the advance of the project was represented by Monique Bestman from the Louis Bolk Institute in The Netherlands, and by Alain Boissy and Agnès Tiret (INRAE, France) from the French National Reference Centre for Animal Welfare (FRCAW). After a reminder of the project objectives and structure, and the presentation of recent PPILOW results, a very rich discussion was engaged. Questions were raised, among others, about the project multiactor approach and the potential interest of a reflexive methodology to evaluate it, and about the assessment of the farmer well-being according to the One Welfare Concept (Garcia Pinillos et al., 2016). The potential interest and need for further research on the dual-purpose breeds aiming at avoiding the elimination of layer male chicks was also debated, with a particular interest for the valorisation of the male and females reared. The usefulness for practitioners, policy makers and labelling entities of welfare assessment tools was discussed, replacing the PIGLOW© and EBENE© apps, respectively built-up and extended within the framework of PPILOW, as tools helping farmers in their dynamics towards welfare improvement on farm through welfare self-assessment and benchmarking. The second part of the meeting was dedicated to the launch of a PPILOW platform, designed in the short term to stimulate discussions between PPILOW partners and the EMB members, and in a longer term to be opened upon registration to other experts and public for a larger discussion. The potential usefulness of such platform after the end of the PPILOW project for a large scientific community was also evoked.