LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 6C: POULTRY AND PORK PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
in France are from Brazil. French soybean production covers only 3% of national consumption. So, in this
paper, we try to answer the following question: Do imported chickens from Brazil, fed with locally produced
grains cause less (or more) impact than chickens produced in France, using a feed part of which comes from
Brazil?
2. Methods
We ran a comparison assuming that the chicken produced in France (FR) was an intensive system with a
feed made with French ingredients (maize, wheat, and rapeseed) and with soybean from Brazil. To represent
this system of standard industrial chicken in France, we chose the region of Bretagne, which concentrates
among the largest quantities of animal production in Europe.
For the Brazilian case (BR), chickens were fed mainly with maize and soybeans produced in the region in
which the chickens were raised. As Brazil is a huge country, we consider that there are two distinct systems.
a) In the Center-West (CW) there is a typical large scale chicken production system. To simplify, we choose
a specific site in Rio Verde, located in the Southwest of Goiás state. b) In the Southern Brazil (SO), we
choose the West of Santa Catarina state, a traditional region of industrial poultry production. The bureau of
foreign trade of Brazil (SECEX, 2011) reported that 75% of exports of chicken come from the three southern
states of the country. As we have these two scenarios that represent the Brazilian situation, we propose a
scenario consisting of 75% of SO chicken (considered representative for the three southern states) and 25%
of CW chicken, adding to this scenario the transport distances. Most stages of the life cycle were similar in
both cases, with the greatest differences being the transportation distances involved. The distances considered
were on average 1370 km from the Centre-West of Brazil to the port of Itajaí (Santa Catarina state), and
on average 500 km from the South of Brazil to the same port, in a refrigerated truck. Then, we considered
more 9700 km of transoceanic ship to the port of Bordeaux, France, and thereafter, another 500 km of railway,
to Bretagne. Table 1 shows the technical indicators adopted for each studied system of poultry production.
Table 1. Technical indicators of poultry production systems in the West of France (FR - standard) and in
Brazil (BR).
Indicator FR
SO
BR
CW
Rearing time (days) 40 42 42
Final weight (kg) 1.92 2.48 2.40
Density (animals/m²) 22.0 11.7 15.0
Mortality (%) 4.1 4.4 4.2
Feed conversion (kg/kg) 1.87 1.86 1.89
No. of batches per year 6.0 6.4 6
Carcass yield (%) 70 74.6 74.6
From production site to Itajaí port – by truck (km) - 500 1370
From Brazil (Itajaí) to France (Bordeaux) – by ship (km) - 9700 9700
France internal transport – by train (km) 500 500 500
Sources: FR system – Peltier & Kollen (2005); CW system - Carfantan (2007); SO system - Martins et al.,
(2007).
In our approach, we consider various scenarios for the production of maize and soybeans for animal feed
in Brazil. For the CW scenario, we consider that a small part of the soybean area (and therefore also of the
maize area, since a field produces two crops within a year, maize after soybeans) was deforested, i.e. the year
preceding the soybean or maize crop it was tropical rainforest or Cerrado. The impacts associated with this
deforestation are included in the impacts of maize and soybeans from CW, where the CO2 is the main issue.
Further information on how we estimated the impacts of deforestation and also on scenarios of feed ingredients
production can be found in Prudêncio da Silva, 2011.
The LCA for the systems studied begins with the production of inputs and goods used to produce crops,
passing through the phases of crop production, grain drying and processing, feed manufacturing, production
of chicks, chicken rearing, slaughter, cooling and packaging of whole chicken, including all transport phases,
up to the slaughterhouse gate, adding the transport to France, for the Brazilian scenario. The production and
maintenance of chicken houses and of slaughterhouse buildings and machines were not included. Functional
unit was 1 ton of chicken cooled and packed delivered in France. The method used for life cycle impact as-
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