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Maps and Graphs |
As with the other livestock species, we have provided a series of maps and graphs for Poultry, which you can view by clicking on the name of one you want to see in the table to the right.
These birds (most importantly chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and pigeons) are easier to keep than larger animals like goats or cattle, or even pigs, - many are left to forage for whatever they can find in the way of food and so require relatively little in the way of skilled management. Little, if any, land is needed, in which they can be housed over night, so it is feasible to keep them in villages and towns, as well as the more rural areas. Equally importantly they are cheap to buy, and relatively easy to sell when a household needs a small amount of cash. They can therefore act as an easily convertible reserve that also provides 'interest' on capital in the way of chicks, eggs, and meat.
Poultry are found almost everywhere (as you can see in the density map) and may well be the only livestock many of the poorer households own. Generally speaking, where there are more households, so are there more poultry, which means that southern Asia and China, which have the most people, also have the most poultry - in fact over half the global total. In most of the world, chickens are the most common species, but in some places, particularly China, the proportion of chickens is low, because they are far outnumbered by ducks.
Poultry are one of the main contributors to the 'Livestock Revolution' which has been occurring worldwide over the past few decades. As human populations have increased, and people have become more concentrated in villages and towns, they have started to rear more poultry - particularly chickens - and the changes in density that have occurred since the sixties are, in some places, quite startling: in China, numbers are increasing fast, though in some developed countries, they have started to decline significantly.
There have been parallel changes in productivity - here measured as the weight of eggs produced per kilogramme of laying hen. Over three quarters of the layer biomass is concentrated in developing countries, and though productivity levels have more than doubled since the eighties, they are still only half that of developed countries.