World Poultry Congress report from Paris

On 7 August, 1,000 participants attended the World Poultry Congress opening ceremony following the opening conference organised by Adisseo on emerging challenges raised by water use. The opening ceremony was an opportunity to celebrate awardees of the International Poultry Hall of Fame, of the Paul Siegel scientific award, the Education award and the Cliff Carpenter assay. A get-together session was organised for both Young Scientists and Youth Program participants.

During the event, more than 1,000 participants originated from Europe, 351 from Asia, 304 from the Americas, 228 from Africa, 164 from the Middle East North African area, and 36 from Oceania.

New in the 2022 congress

In 2022, the World Poultry Congress entered the digital era. All posters were electronic, and all plenary sessions and a selection of parallel sessions were live streamed and recorded. At the end of the Congress, it appeared that 2,000 participants were present on site from 85 countries, whereas 500 individual remote connections had taken place.

Major trends in the poultry sector

The programme during the congress featured one opening conference on water with 6 speakers, 11 plenary sessions with 12 speakers addressing major trends for the poultry sector and 45 parallel sessions with 38 invited speakers and 179 short oral communications. Speakers originated from 47 countries.

In addition, 9 technical symposia were organised by the congress’ sponsors. Following 3 calls for submissions, a total of 1,225 abstracts were accepted and published in 3 volumes of proceedings.

Hot topics

Among the topics proposed for submission with accepted abstracts, 17 were defined as ‘object-oriented’, meaning that a complex challenge was addressed with a combination of approaches and disciplines whereas 28 were specialized and defined according to WPSA working groups’ domains. Object-oriented sessions dealt, for instance, with interactions between nutrition, genetics and epigenetics, with management of broiler breeders or the early management of the embryo, or with new approaches such as robotics.

The program also provided the opportunity to revive the African Poultry Network and the Small-Scale Family Poultry Farming working group, which launched a process to establish their strategic agendas.

The next World Poultry Congress will be held in Toronto in 2026.