Production Structure Adjustment Of Animal Husbandry Based On Animal Product Consumption

The food consumption mode of Chinese people is in the key period of transition. The structure of food is shifting from vegetal dominated to the animal and vegetal balanced, the pattern of consumption is changing towards the diversification of food away-from-home (FAFH), finished products and semi-finished products. With the shift from seller's market to buyer's market, the production structure is expected to change as well. This paper analyses the consumption and production structure of animal products systematically, trying to find the production adjustment direction adapting to the changes of consumption, and provide policy suggestions in the interest of the sustainable and healthy development of China's animal husbandry.Firstly, this paper performs a statistical analysis on the consumption characteristics and development trend of animal products around the 21st century. The results show that with income increasing the growth rate of animal product consumption is rising for residents both at and away from home. Consumption at home increased mostly, followed by size is that of the fresh milk and milk product, beef and mutton, poultry, egg and pork. FAFH is still luxury for urban residents.The main problems existed in the production structure of China's animal husbandry are: (i) The grain-based livestock production pattern sharpens the contradiction between feed supply and demand; (ii) Dairy industry is the weakest link in China's livestock industry; (iii) We are short on safe and high quality animal products; (iv) Regional distribution of livestock production has not make full use of feed resources, for example, grassland resources are not being fully utilized in the south, and granary potential has been underplayed in the northeast area, etc.The incompatible development of animal production structure and consumption structure is due to following reasons: the lack of multilevel and diversification of production structure; the significant gap between product quality and consumer demand; and the contradiction between low production efficiency and strong market demand.The adjustment of livestock production structure is a complicated systematic program, affected by national conditions, geographical features, agricultural development, and other factors, in which demand and production efficiency are two important factors. To consider the country as a whole, select the income elasticity of demand and feed conversion rate as the evaluation indexes, and use grey relational model to calculate correlation coefficient. The result shows that the correlation coefficient of milk products is the highest, followed by beef, mutton, poultry, egg and pork. The dairy industry should be given priority in all the breeding industries, followed by beef industry, sheep industry, poultry industry, egg industry and pork industry. This result is consistent with the guiding ideology for livestock production structure adjustment.According to regional comparative advantage theory, the result of integrated comparative advantage index of animal products in 31 provinces showed that, the dominant area of pork production is in the central and southeastern China, while beef production in the northwestern, northern and northeastern China, mutton production in the northwestern and northeastern China, poultry production in the southeastern, central and northern China, milk production in the northeastern, northwestern and northern China, and egg production in the northern, northeastern and central China.Feed efficiency is a technical efficiency indicator, affected by many factors. The results show that herd species structure, feed nutrient preparation, disease controlling are three main factors, and the weights of which exceed 10 percent. The next factors are feed processing and storage, rate of good varieties, herd structure, feeding environment, the weights of which exceed 5 percent.