It seems appropriate before delving into the attractive and dynamic sector of pig production, considering the advances of the last decade and possible projections. Undoubtedly in an increasingly globalized productive, economic, political and social terms world, it is difficult sectioning the sector addressing only regional issues, this is how we will try to give an overview to go then rescuing certain relevant features (differentiating or similar by region) for future entries of this blog.

The domestic pig (Sus scrofa spp.) is grown worldwide (with exceptions given by culture and/or religion in certain areas). Swine production accounted 109,122,261.07 generated tons of pig meat in 2012 (FAO, 2014), with a quantity of animals intended for slaughter for the year of 1,394,493,497.01 which means that each animal generated 78.25 Kg of meat. Although the situation described above lacks real technical rigor because they are only considered official information of the top 50 countries in importance to the sector, other official figures are estimates and are not considered relevant factors about zootechnical nature; as you can see the figure brings a sense, if and if you would didactic, at the time that much remains to be done in the sector to increase rates zootechnical performance, which undoubtedly will go hand by hand with the improved health status.

Another exercise in the same line is to see what amount of meat is available to every person in the world for the same year, so as following the same dynamics and using the same sources we could say that there was a provision of 15.61 Kg of meat/year/person. We would like to emphasize that it is calculation that not consider objective factors such as the target population in age of eating pork, distribution of wealth, cultural and religious differences, access to worldwide swine protein, the importance of provisioning of other animal proteins and many other variables. But this shows that it is possible to achieve a substantial increase in pork meat to accompany regional consumer demands of the population, a situation which we discuss later.

About ht importance of volume fragmentation tons of pork produced by each continent we have:

Source: Prepared by FAO data, 2014.

We see that in order of importance is Asia for 2012 generated more than half of the pig, then Europe with a little more than a fifth of the cabin, Latin with a little more than 15 % of the cabin, Africa and in a position of very little importance with less than 2% and lastly Oceania with 0.57 % of the world’s pig population.

The above trend continued for the years 2013, 2014, and is likely to remain as projection for this year 2015, since we are talking about the pig itself from every continent and is aimed at generating meat pork.

This situation changes dramatically if we consider the dynamics under which the market pork behaves globally. First we must mention that it is an active market and therefore is affected by: -crisis of animal diseases, population growth, changes in incomes, the level of urbanization, changes in consumer preferences and tastes of consumers, related with levels of health and food safety, animal welfare factor (that is becoming more important), the different types of production, zootechnical characteristics (classical genetic lines – Industrial – intensive, extensive, organic, ecological to name a few)-.

In the next post we will see the market behavior globally.