INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION IN ANIMAL BREEDING AS REACTION ON GLOBALIZATION

Looking on the international market for animal genetic we find a lot of companies, which are offering their products worldwide by own official representatives. Examples may be the North American organisations ABBS or Semex or even CRVfrom the Netherlands. But also in pigs such enterprises like PIC are acting in many countries of the world. Therefore it seems to be necessary to have a closer view on the development of animal breeding companies in the last 20 years. Our breeding organisations were founded about 1900 and worked on a regional level up to 1970 or 1980. These regional acting organisations more and more worked together on a national level. Up to 1990 the breeding values were calculated on regional base in Germany with different models and programmes in different regions. For German Fleckvieh we had sire evaluation for the whole breed throughout Germany since 1995. For this reason the links between the different regions were not very tight, and the import of genetics from another region was limited to outstanding sires, which promised a good proof in the own region. At the same time the Interbull centre in Uppsala in Sweden worked on the topic of comparing breeding values from different countries for other countries. In the first step they calculated equations for the conversion of the EBV from different countries. A few years later the MACE method was developed and gives us now a good impression whether a sire from New Zealand may be the right for our region or not. Nowadays a proof in one region is a good base for a worldwide sale of semen of this bull. Regarding this level of development an international strategy is possible and necessary in animal breeding and not only in marketing.