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Various animal welfare assurance programs are being used to encourage or require the adoption of animal welfare standards in food production, and to assure the public that such standards are followed. The programs involve five main formats. Non-mandatory codes/guidelines are relatively easy to institute and appear well-supported by the industry, but provide only minimal assurance to the public unless measures are taken to ensure compliance. Programs based on government regulations and inter-governmental agreements are more challenging to institute; they are likely to generate less industry acceptance, but may provide more public confidence if enforcement is adequate. Product differentiation programs, and retailer policies requiring products to meet certain standards, serve a range of functions; these may generate public confidence but only for products covered. The various programs include several types of requirements. Requirements that are designed to maintain animal health and functioning have a widely accepted scientific basis, are often easy to incorporate into existing production systems, and often provide economic benefits, but do not fully address public concerns over animal welfare in some cultures. Requirements that address pain, distress and other affective states, and those that accommodate certain natural behaviour, have a growing but less traditional scientific rationale and appear likely to generate public confidence; however, they sometimes require significant changes to existing practices. Requirements for more natural surroundings (outdoor, free-range) seem to generate public confidence, but appear most likely to increase costs, least likely to be supported by the existing industry, and may involve trade-offs with productivity and with other aspects of animal welfare. The various formats and requirements provide a range of policy options for addressing animal welfare concerns in different cultural, industry and market contexts.

In the last three decades, transport economists and geographers have published an array of studies on port institutions and governance. Many of these publications emphasize the role of institutions in enabling or inhibiting port efficiencies, port competition (inter and intra) and the development of a port's resources and capabilities. Political instabilities and their consequential economic lags have to some extent misaligned the pace of institutional reforms in Southern African ports compared with ports in the developed world. Some ports in this region (South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Mauritius and Madagascar) have however, over the last 10 to 15 years begun to follow the port reform trend, and as such have undergone various degrees of institutional reform. This work seeks to provide a detailed case study which discloses a holistic overview of recent and on-going institutional reforms of Southern African ports from two perspectives. Firstly, by assessing the extent to which institutional structures have shaped and mediated port development in Southern Africa. Secondly, by conducting a port institutional positioning comparison between a range of North European and Southern African container ports in order to determine how similarly Southern African ports resemble more established first world ports. Southern African ports effectively present a unique case of mixed port institutional development trends compared to those in more developed regions of the world. As such, this case study reinforces the fact that different port institutional structures are locally embedded and do matter in port competition, and that institutional reform has supported port development to varying degrees.