L'aviculture française vingt ans après : les limites de la « révolution avicole » dans la filière volailles de chair
Authors: Schaller B. 
Published: October 2009

French poultry industry changed so rapidly during the last 20 years that is was considered as an exemple of the future organization of french agri-business.

However, 20 years after the beginning of the « poultry revolution », there still are large numbers of poultry producers, chicken feed companies and slaughter-houses. This situation must be explained since, with the available techniques, the same production could be obtained from a few large producers and processing plants. Our analysis will attempt to show why the industrialization of poultry sector followed an inexpected path. The present report is based on the first findings of a research in progress on the actual results of the poultry revolution, its significance and limits.

Two warnings before the main results are presented : the main part of the study does not deal with egg-production, it is based almost exclusively on existing data which are unfortunately sparse and fairly often uncertain.

The distribution of meat chicken flocks is nearly statistically normal among the population of trench farm units. In other words, they are distributed among all farm sizes (in terms of acreages) and in all kinds of production systems. In spite of the high rate of concentration in poultry units during the last 15 years, their distribution among size classes and farm types did not change. In short, poultry units have been inserted in all kinds of farms, their expansion did not induce any massive change in their structure and the new model expected by many economists : the highly specialised poultry unit with no land, did not emerge.

The main purpose of contracts in broiler production is to insure a flexible planning of production. However it is not

as widespread as had been predicted (30 % of production is without contracts) and many of the cases of integration are

rather loose with verbal agreements — not entirely unlike the situation of dairy farmers with regard to their relations with the dairy industry.

In spite of its low price, poultry meat was not heavily substituted to other meats. Competition between pork and poultry (stronger in France than in other OECD countries), the high rate of consumption of home produced poultry and the high level of purchases of poultry and rabbits produced by the small traditional farm flocks (nearly 50 % of the total consumption), the strength of food consumption habits (french people have been heavy poultry consumers for about a century), all these factors restrict the development of « industrial » broiler and explain the nature of their present market.

It seems that these three conclusions shed some light on the original development of the french chicken sector. The lack of specialization of the farms producing poultry and its corollary, the small size of flocks compared to the optimal ones, are due to a double constraint :

a) the poultry activity remains linked to the other farm productions because its labour requirements are now so reduced (between 1960 an 1973 the working time required for a medium flock was reduced by half). An other factor requiring insertion in a (diversified) farm is the low profitability of poultry and the high costs of the necessary investments.

b) this structure of broilers production is linked to the structure of slaughter plants and the marketing system. In France most poultry is consumed fresh (not frozen), thence the marketing system must be very flexible and handle small diversified and urgent orders. This requires that the slaughter houses be able to draw on a variety of sources of supply. So the industry remains inconcentrated and does not now attract outside capital, in spite of what had been predicted.