Germany again holds a world championship: From here, more merchandise is exported abroad than is from any other nation. Even as far as jobs are concerned, Germany meanwhile emerges victorious. Because of cartel agreements on the pay scale, because of high social security contributions and due to the high tax burden, hundreds of thousands of costly jobs are given up and exported abroad.
Agricultural jobs are being exported for ideological reasons, in particular. Since cage rearing was forbidden for layer management, Germany's agriculture was forced into giving up national chicken management to a large extent or even to moving it abroad. The latter is done "successfully" on a large scale.
From ideological reasons, the Federal Government wants to establish a way of chicken management that does not work. The kind of floor management which is striven for by the Federal Government is quite an unhygienic way of keeping chicken. Chicken always scratch in their own manure, picking the maggots out of it. This way, the chicken get infected with diseases and the eggs get infected with salmonellae. 20 % of all chicken held this way don't even survive it -- quite contrary to cage management, where a loss of about 3 % only is observed, thanks to the fact that less medicine needs to be used. Consumer protection especially is a reason to choose cage management, which is superior to floor management in this respect. Eggs and manure are being transported out of the poultry house immediately on separate ways.
German livestock husbandry is really harassed with the demanding of high standards which are by no means relevant but only founded on ideology. As a result of this, Germany's competition is playing a losing game on the pan-European level as well as all over the world.
For this reason, I appeal to the Federal Government that they do not take the Layer Hen Housing Act as an example but rather reconsider again the draft Pig Keeping Decree. Above all, they should be aware of the fact that jobs, once they are exported abroad, cannot be brought back to Germany, even if we had another government again. After all, it's not the jobs in agriculture alone that this is all about: So many employees in the businesses around agriculture are affected, too.