Section 5: Egg production decelerates
- World layer numbers and hen egg production
- World egg production ranking
Growth in the global egg industry has slowed in the past few years. FAO data on layer numbers and egg production in 2006 have yet to be released, while the figures for 2005 has been revised downwards, pointing to an increase of around 1.5% compared with between 3.5-4.0% in the period 1995 to 2000 and between 2.0-3.0% between 2000 and 2005. Nevertheless, the number of layers worldwide will have come close to 5700 million last year while egg output will have been in the region of 60 million tonnes.
This year should see some acceleration in numbers but looking further ahead it would be unrealistic to expect an annual growth of much above 3%.
By 1995 egg production in developing countries had exceeded that from the developed economies. This trend has since been maintained such that egg output from the former accounted for more than two-thirds of the global total in 2005. This has primarily come about through expansion in Asia where bird numbers and egg output now represent around 60% of the world total, compared with about 53% back in the mid-1990’s. Increases in Asia have, to a great extent, stemmed from expansion in China, where egg output has accelerated by almost 80% from 13.7 million tonnes in 1995 to 24.4mt in 2005, at which point it represented more than 41% of the global total.
China output continues to expand
The China Statistic Bureau has stated that in 2006 egg output in China expanded by 2.4% to 29.5mt but this figure includes ducks eggs. As hen eggs tend to represent about 85% of the total, production in 2006 looks likely to have been around 25mt.
As Asia captures an increasing proportion of world production, the other main regions have seen their shares decline.
An assessment of global patterns of egg production by the International Egg Commission’s Statistical Analyst, Dr Hans Wilhelm Windhorst, reveals the dramatic shifts that have occurred since 1970. At that time the top ten egg producing countries accounted for around 70% of world production. In 1970, the leading producing countries were, in order of size: the USA, the USSR, Japan, China, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Only four of these are listed in the 2005 top ten which were China, the USA, India, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, France, Indonesia and Turkey. So, in 1970, only two Asian countries were among the leaders, whereas today there are four. Three of these, China, India and Japan account for 50% of total egg production.
Higher volume, smaller size
On the topic of rankings, it is worth noting that while in terms of egg output measured in tonnage, China, the world’s number one, produces 4.6 times the volume of hen eggs as the USA, in terms of the number of eggs produced this ratio widens to 5.4, because the average weight of an egg in China, where a high percentage of output comes from relatively small family farms, is less than 50g, whereas in the USA this figure is closer to 60g.