What future for research in animal production and animal health ?

Abstract

The planetary dimension of research problems (sustainable development, climatic changes, biodiversity management, water quality, food safety, emerging diseases and bioenergies), the growing need in the future to increase world food supplies as an answer to an increasing demography and the evolution of the animals’ status have placed the animal, breeding management, and their products at the centre of the society’s debates. After looking at the issues to which tomorrows’ agronomist will be confronted, some research axes that have priority are discussed. They are part of the objective for a finalised agronomical research for adapted foods, a preserved environment and a competitive and lasting agriculture and involve both public and private actors. The relation between breeding, its products and the environment must be explored, analysed, modelled in order for practices to evolve and for ecology and farming to be reconciled. The analysis of the big issues that condition the evolution of the place of animal products in human food will allow the revision of our research system and will include an integrative dimension that is essential. The large potential of progress and innovation offered by genomics and post-genomics should be explored. The mastering of infectious processes, emerging or old, necessitates the development of a real ecology of diseases, including environmental aspects. In order to really master these different dimensions, the researcher in animal science will have to open his/her thoughts and projects to those of other fields of study (ecology, agronomy, human nutrition, sociology, farming economics, products...) and to build their research questions by diversifying their partnerships, within the framework of a renewed and constructive dialogue with society.