How much livestock is there in the world

Meat and Animal Feed. Plate or feed trough? FAO, November Transforming the livestock sector through the Sustainable Development Goals. FAO, Production - Live Animals - Stocks. Food and Drink Report Animal Production. Livestock solutions for climate change. Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet. Grade A Choice? Solutions for Deforestation-free Meat. Union of Concerned Scientists, Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK.

Climatic Change, July , Volume Civil Society. Pork has long been the most popular choice at the dinner table. But poultry has now caught up, and is likely to overtake it. Now poultry makes up a third of all the meat eaten worldwide. But it still remains nearly five times more popular than lamb. The environmental cost of our growing appetite for meat is alarming.

Meat farming produces much higher emissions per calorie than vegetables. Beef is by far the worst culprit — four times higher than chicken or pork. But it is not just the greenhouse gases produced by livestock that damage the environment.

Cattle farming, in particular, requires much more land than other forms of agriculture, which drives deforestation. The largest population of cattle in the world is in Brazil, where numbers have quadrupled in 50 years , a trend that has led to the destruction of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest. Meat production is also a thirsty business, at a time when the availability and abundance of fresh water supplies are becoming a major concern.

For many people, meat is an important source of protein, vitamins and minerals. But some meats are high in saturated fats that can raise cholesterol, and eating too much red and processed meat has been linked to bowel cancer. The burgers, steaks and sausages served up in most wealthier countries tend to be a lot bigger than the recommended 70g a day.

The livestock economy is particularly important for poor rural populations in low- and middle-income countries. Some of these involve the cultivation of animal cells in labs — growing real meat in a petri dish rather than using an animal.

China's got plenty of cattle, although the country is less important here than it is for other types of livestock. By and large, chicken populations tend to track human populations pretty closely — chicken production isn't quite as dependent on finding suitable pasture as, say, cattle is.

The highest densities are in eastern China, in Pakistan and India, and in western Europe. The United States is worth highlighting here — lots of chickens on the densely populated East Coast and in the South, but very few in the central and western states. The researchers who made these maps were also, for the first time, able to disaggregate chicken and duck distributions.

That's useful for people trying to track the spread of diseases like the avian flu — particularly in places like China where both chickens and ducks are raised. China is responsible for roughly half of the world's pork supply, and you see that on the map — the world's densest concentrations of pigs are in eastern China.

That said, one cautionary note: many researchers have argued that China's statistics on meat production are unreliable, as local officials have incentives to inflate their production numbers. The problem seems to be especially flagrant in the pork industry.

So it's possible that actual pork numbers are somewhat lower than available data suggests. So why map livestock? In part because livestock is such a dominant force on the planet — for better and for worse.

Livestock is already responsible for both the food and livelihoods of roughly 1 billion people on the planet. And, the authors of the PLOS One paper note, that number is expected to skyrocket in the decades ahead. As developing countries get richer, demand for meat is expected to rise 73 percent between and Demand for milk is expected to rise 58 percent, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

In , Asia produced only 12 percent. Production increases in Asia, however, have been staggering: meat production has increased fold since Absolute increases in production in other regions have also been substantial, with output in all regions with exception to the Caribbean which approximately tripled growing more than 5-fold over this period.

However, the distribution of meat types varies significantly across the world; in some countries, other meat types such as wild game, horse, and duck can account for a significant share of total production.

Although production of all major meat types have been increasing in absolute terms, in relative terms the share of global meat types have changed significantly over the last 50 years.

In , poultry meat accounted for only 12 percent of global meat production; by its share has approximately tripled to around 35 percent. In comparison, beef and buffalo meat as a share of total meat production has nearly halved, now accounting for around 22 percent. In the chart we see the global production of cattle beef and buffalo meat.

Globally, cattle meat production has more than doubled since — increasing from 28 million tonnes per year to 68 million tonnes in Global production of poultry meat has increased rapidly over the last 50 years, growing more than fold between Global trends in poultry production are shown in the chart.

China and Brazil are also large poultry producers at 18 and 13 million tonnes, respectively. Collectively, Europe is also a major poultry producer with an ouput in of approximately 19 million tonnes — just below output of the United States.

China dominates global output, producing just short of half of total pigmeat in Increases in Chinese pigmeat production have been rapid, growing around fold from 1. Global population has undergone rapid growth , especially in the second half of the 20th century; we may therefore also expect the rapid growth in total meat production as explored in the sections above. But how has meat consumption changed on a per capita basis? In the chart we see a global map of per capita meat excluding seafood and fish consumption, measured in kilograms per person per year.

As a global average, per capita meat consumption has increased approximately 20 kilograms since ; the average person consumed around 43 kilograms of meat in This increase in per capita meat trends means total meat production has been growing at a much faster than the rate of population growth. The direction and rate of change across countries has highly variable.

Growth in per capita meat consumption has been most marked in countries who have underwent a strong economic transition — per capita consumption in China has grown approximately fold since ; rates in Brazil have nearly quadrupled.

The major exception to this pattern has been India: dominant lactovegetarian preferences mean per capita meat consumption in was almost exactly the same as in at less than 4 kilograms per person. Meat consumption is highest across high-income countries with the largest meat-eaters in Australia, consuming around kilograms per person in The average European and North American consumes nearly 80 kilograms and more than kilograms, respectively.

However, changes in consumption in high-income countries have been much slower — with most stagnating or even decreasing over the last 50 years. Consumption trends across Africa are varied; some countries consume as low as 10 kilograms per person, around half of the continental average.

Higher-income nations such as South Africa consume between kilograms per person. One of the strongest determinants of how much meat people eat is how rich they are.

This is at least true when we make cross-country comparisons. In the scatterplot we see the relationship between per capita meat supply on the y-axis and average GDP per capita on the x-axis. What we see is a strong positive relationship: the richer a country is, the more meat the average person typically eats.