Animal Welfare Standards in the Chicken & Egg (food)System

Farm animal welfare is no longer a domain owned by agriculture. Perceptions of what good animal welfare is, have expanded in breadth and intensity in recent decades. Justification of animal welfare is in flux and opens a space for individuals and organisations to engage in farm animal welfare values and concerns and how they are to be defined and legitimized. Animal welfare in flux also opens a new space for economic activities and alliances. Animal welfare has become a commodity for sale, which in Buller and Roe’s (2018) analysis is framed as assurance, branding and labelling, respectively, but also in the changing governance of food supply chains (p.86), the accumulation of the power of retail in the food chain identified by e.g., Burch and Lawrence (2007; 2013), Clapp and Fuchs (2009). This paper addresses the space of opportunity for economic organisations in profiting from being drivers of new standards on the new conventions on animal welfare in the food system. The paper employs a framework distinguishing how organisations connected to the egg and poultry value chains use competing conventions on animal welfare in both changing how food is being produced – changing the welfare of animals - and marketed. The paper is based on empirical data from the egg and poultry value chains in Norway, compared with data from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.