Chicken and Fish Industry Comparison
February 24th, 2008 by AndrewMeeting the challenge of filling the fish production gap will require that aquaculture adopt ‘intensive’ production methodologies. Several industries have managed to successfully achieve this transition - one of these is the chicken meat industry. Although many of the issues that will need to be faced by the aquaculture industry will be different from chicken meat industry, there will also many that are a similar.
What is certain is that if we are to fill the fish production gap, the aquaculture industry will need to make the transition to chicken meat industry productivity and quality benchmarks in 10% of the time that the chicken industry took to achieve them. This means that aquaculture will need to have achieved the chicken meat industry metrics inside five years.
On a global scale the annual production of broiler meat is 40.5 million metric tonnes derived from approximately 48 billion birds. This volume of production is close to the projected 2030 fish production gap.
Australia’s chicken meat industry has grown from a scattered and informal adjunct to egg production into a major industry with assets in excess of $6 billion, and a turnover of $3.6 billion over the past fifty years. The industry generates 120,000 jobs through the economy, this figure including nearly 40,000 people in direct employment by the industry. Chicken meat consumption per capita in 2002/03 was 33.8kg rising to 36.5kg in 2005/06. It is poised to replace beef as the most popular meat of Australian consumers. Consumption has increased 27% over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing at between 1-5% pa for at least the next five years. Production in 2002/03 was around 650,000 tonnes of chicken meat from 420 million birds processed. Approximately 98% of the total output goes to the domestic market. The relative price of chicken meat has fallen consistently over the past few decades, due largely to automation of processing, genetic improvements in the birds used and enlightened on-farm feeding and management practices.
Information on the current development priorities for the chicken meat industry plan can be reviewed here.
Tags: chicken, intensive
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