FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

China Is Expecting a Major Chicken Shortage During the Year of the Rooster

In the Chinese zodiac, the rooster signifies fortune, luck, and protection, something that China's seven billion chicken farmers are not getting a lot of these days.
Photo via Flickr user Victoria Reay

The year of the rooster is looking like it's going to be a rough one for both poultry and people in China, as a serious chicken shortage looms in the nation of more than 1.3 billion people.

You could assume that the country with the most people in the world would have the most chickens in the world. In large part, this assumption would be due to the fact that humans really love eating chickens, and that chickens, it's sad to say, now exist on this planet almost solely for human consumption.

Advertisement

But China relies heavily on outside suppliers to get chicken into its food supply. The breed of chicken most frequently used for meat in China is a white-feathered broiler chicken, and 90 percent of white broilers in the People's Republic are imported from the US and France.

READ MORE: Eggs Are Now More Expensive Than Chicken

It takes about two years to get the edible offspring of these French and American "grandparent" chickens to the market, according to a recent report by South China Morning Post, and that lag is at the root of the expected shortage.

Two years ago, China banned the importation of all US poultry in the wake of a stateside avian flu outbreak, an outbreak which eventually made its way to France and led to further bans. Because of this, China was forced to import only half as many breeding chickens, relying mostly on Poland, Spain, and New Zealand.

Now, two years after these bans, China's proverbial chickens are coming home to not roost and things are only going to get worse, according to those following the market. "We believe chicken production in China will decline sharply in the next three years," an industry analyst quoted in the South China Morning Post said, meaning a lot less chicken in the year of the rooster.

In the Chinese zodiac, the rooster signifies fortune, luck, and protection, something that China's chicken farmers are not getting a lot of these days.