Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

Chapter 2 – Milk availability: Current production and demand and medium-term outlook 21
figure 2.9
Per capita income and dietary energy intake from dairy, various countries, 2007
1 000
Energy intake from dairy (kcal/person/day)
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
0 10 000 20 000 30 000 40 000 50 000 60 000
Per capita GDP (PPP adjusted)
Note: GDP per capita is measured at purchasing power parity (PPP) in constant 2005 international US$.
Source: FAOSTAT, 2011 for per capita dairy consumption and the World Bank for per capita GDP.
amounts of precooked, fast and convenience foods (Rae, 1998; King, Tityen and
Vickner, 2000; Schmidhuber and Shetty, 2005). Rae (1998) found that urbanization
significantly increased demand for animal products in a sample of East Asian
economies, independently of income levels.
While purchasing power and urbanization explain much of the change in per
capita consumption, other factors – including social and cultural ones – can have
a large influence locally. For example, Brazil and Thailand have similar income per
capita and urbanization rates but per capita animal product consumption is roughly
twice as high in Brazil as in Thailand. Japan consumes significantly less livestock
products per capita than other countries at comparable income levels. In South Asia
per capita consumption of meat is lower than income alone would explain, largely
for religious and cultural reasons (Rae and Nayga, 2010).
Natural resource endowment also indirectly affects consumption, as it influences
the relative costs and prices of food commodities. Access to marine resources, on
the one hand, and to natural resources for livestock production, on the other, influence
consumption trends in opposite directions. What may be perceived as lactose
intolerance limits milk consumption in Asia in particular (Dong, 2006). 4
4 See Chapter 4 for a further discussion.