Harry Blokhuis, coordinator
We are pleased to announce that our second Stakeholder Conference on 3 and 4 May 2007 in Berlin was a great success! More than 165 people from over 20 countries participated in this meeting. The proceedings and presentations are all available on our web site and are receiving a lot of interest; clearly, they give a good insight in the current status of the project and the issues at hand. Therefore, I would like to invite those of you who were not present in Berlin to take a look and visit the dedicated web pages for further updates about what’s going on in Welfare Quality®. The discussions at the conference were high-level and stimulating, and we received some very encouraging responses as well as constructive advice. I believe it is very relevant to acknowledge a broad agreement between stakeholders on important issues:
●  Animal welfare is relevant to citizens.
●  There is a need to provide information to consumers regarding the welfare of farm animals and to assure that animal welfare is taken into account.
●  Assessment of welfare should primarily be based on animal parameters.
●  The tools developed by Welfare Quality® should allow for different means of product information for consumers (e.g. labels, branding and other tools).
● Consumers often link/bundle animal welfare with other issues (e.g. food safety, health, environment). These shared opinions clearly underpin and guide the work and future tasks of our project.
Harry Blokhuis, coordinator, harry.blokhuis@wur.nl