The French package covers meeting technical and economic aims; food safety objectives as well as environmental management expertise.

Bright Food is China’s second-largest food business, with sales of EUR 9 billion a year.

The vertically-integrated group farms 70,000 hectares and is the country’s largest sugar producer.

It also produces 540,000 slaughter pigs a year, runs a dairy herd of 50,000 head and has a laying flock of 300,000 hens, as well as operating 5,000 hectares of fish farm. It owns more than 100 food brands and operates 4,000 food outlets across China.

Sections of the French pig industry and Chinese firms have been collaborating since 2008 to share French pig husbandry know-how.

IFIP represents all sectors of the French pig industry and is in a position to deliver a long term partnership that will include pig industry technology transfers between France and China in the coming years.

This will include both upstream aspects, such as genetics through ADN, as well as the development of downstream solutions. Bright Food’s long term objectives include the doubling of its pig production to one million finished pigs a year on its own farms.

IFIP will work alongside its Chinese partners to deliver training, conferences, joint studies and research programmes.

China is home to about half the world’s pig herd and faces technical challenges.

Pig farming development is a Chinese government priority, requiring both technical training and management structures that have been lacking in the past.

Among these challenges is the fact that the Chinese pig industry is an importer of raw materials and the country is an importer of pigmeat. The French are established pigmeat exporters to China and could ship more.

The signing ceremony was attended by French food industry minister Guillaume Garot, where the signatories were Bright Food vice president Zhang Hanqiang, IFIP president Jacques Lemaitre and ADN president Jean Yves Guillerm.

Pictured: M. Lemaitre (right) and the minister (centre) with Hanqiang (left) .