Section 8: Manufactured Feed

• Poultry maintains its 40% share of the feed market

While the official FAO poultrymeat and egg production data have yet to be released for 2006, our provisional estimates point to further growth, though at a reduced rate for both sectors.

Our estimate for poultrymeat output just falls short of 83 million tonnes. Despite the fact that many industries were hit by outbreaks of HPAI, surprisingly, it appears that global output could still have expanded by around 1.5%. This compares with an average annual increase of around 3% since 2000.

While it looks as though a slower rate of growth has been evident in the egg sector, we now estimate total output worldwide in 2006 at about 60 million tonnes.

Both sectors can anticipate expansion this year but the rate of growth in the next decade will be markedly slower than in the past 10 years.

2% growth over 2005

Watt’s Feed International’s World Feed Panorama Survey, which is based on data collated from feed professionals and correspondents in more than 60 feed producing countries, found that despite several negative factors such as high raw material and energy costs and the impact of animal diseases on the demand for meat, that manufactured feed production still expanded in 2006 to an estimated 635 million tonnes or 2% more than in the previous year. In its report, a poultry market analyst is quoted as estimating that the impact of bird flu had cut industry output by about a million tonnes in that year. Nevertheless, the research supported estimates that more than 40% of industrial animal feed goes for the production of poultrymeat and eggs.

In contrast to these findings it must be appreciated that the estimate of poultry feed output shown in the accompanying chart is entirely a theoretical exercise and at best can only be taken as a broad guide to the likely picture.

Small increase for poultrymeat

While a year ago we envisaged that there would be little or no expansion in poultrymeat production in 2006, the available figures point to a small increase of around 1.5% which when translated into feed output equates with around 146 million tonnes.

Similarly, the estimate of egg output indicates a rise of just over 1% which, allowing for the feed used in pullet production, as well as for the birds in lay, amounts to a usage figure of around 144 million tonnes. Thus, for the second successive year, it looks as though the volume of feed for poultrymeat production has outweighed that used by the egg sector. In which case, the combined usage in 2006 will have reached a new peak of some 290mt, which is some 100mt more than 12 years earlier. Although the percentage growth in the future will be smaller than in the past, the end of 2008 will likely see the feed requirement exceed the 300mt mark.