Newschicken, poultry, chicken meat, U.N.Food and Agriculture Organization, protein source
Dec 06, 2015 04:56 AM EST
The U.N.Food and Agriculture Organization expects chicken to overtake pork as the most-consumed meat in the world by 2020.
In an article by The Wall Street Journal, agribusiness executives cited several reasons for this shift. One is that chicken has a mild flavor. Also, it is accepted by a broad cultural and religious spectrum, making it more universal than other meats. Chicken is also cheaper to produce, especially that it does not need much land.
The global population is seen to leap from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050. This means, food producers are burdened with the task to produce 455 million metric tons of meat every year by then.
Global Meat News reported that global chicken price went down by 10 percent compared to last year. Rabobank analyst Nan-Dirk Mulder said that this decline shows how volatile the poultry market is. Rabobank, however, stated in its Poultry Quarterly Q4 report that the poultry industry faces a positive outlook for next year.
"The extent to which the global poultry industry will benefit from these positive fundamentals very much depends on balancing supply and demand," said Mulder in a report by Meat Poultry. "After a relatively long bullish market situation, many global markets have entered a period of oversupply at the end of 2015 with falling chicken prices and this needs to be solved in the next months in order to make the industry profitable again."
JBS, the Brazilian giant meat company, is putting its bets on chicken as the next top global protein source, according to Wesley Batista, one of the company's executives.
In Argentina per-capita poultry consumption is expected to rise at a record level of 7.5 percent this year. This is a big shift considering that the country has long been focused on beef production. China, which loves its pork, is now pushing for measures to increase the output of chicken for the past 10 years.
At present, there are 60 billion chickens being slaughtered worldwide for their meat as a source of protein.