Study On The Consumption Of Animal Products In China

With the development of the agriculture in China and the impact of joining WTO in the future, the increase of farmers?income has become the most concerned problem for the government. Animal husbandiy is highly regarded and needs to be strengthened in the adjustment of agriculture structure from the aspects of developing preview and international competition as well as increase of farmers?income. However, is it possible for the development of Animal husbandry in China to get support from increase of consumption? We need to have a comprehensive and deep research on the urban and rural consumption of livestock product in China. But the researches on this subject are not satist~抜ng presently. One of the important reasons is that the reliability of production and consumption data from National Statistics Bureau is doubtful.The investigation for animal product consumption has been made in six provinces. By the investigation data, we computed the livestock product consumption and its structure of residents in cities and villages of China in 1998, from which we analyzed the consumer consumption preference and action for the livestock products and made use of HALF LOG model, AIDS model and HECKMAN model to do econometric analysis on the obviousness, income elasticity, price elasticity, prediction of the market influence of animal product consumption for total indoor and outdoor consumers, indoor buyers and outdoor eaters.We found the animal product consumption in 1998 had already reached the higher level than before and the consumption data of livestock products from National Statistics Bureau were seriously underestimated. One major reason is that those data didn include outdoor consumption while the outdoor consumption had increased significantly in recent years. When we used consumption to predict the production of animal products, we found the data from NSB in 1998 reflected the reality, but poultry and egg production was possibly overestimated. Although the consumption level of animal products was higher than before, there a large gap between urban and rural residents. The proportion of fat consumption decreased while the proportion of cooked animal product consumption increased.Pork is the favorite animal product for most urban and rural residents in China, but the consumption of fish, milk, beef and mutton increases swiftly with the generalization of nutrition science knowledge. Agricultural product markets in citys and bazaars in113towns are the most important sales channels of animal products. The increasingconvenience fOr buying these productS will have slight influence on consumption whilethe quality of animal products is preventing the increase of consumption and export.The result of model estimation implies th8t income is an impobot factor whichhas a great influence on consumption of animal productS for residents in cities andvillages, and that age, education years, racial and region characters all have differenteXtent influences, and th8t careers, positions, sex and whether the observers are hostS havea large effect on the breakfast and group dinner outdoors. By comparing the incomeelasticity of demand of residentS in cities with that in villages, we fOtmd that the incomee1asticity of city residents for milk, fish and beef as well as mutton was higher than that ofvillage residentS for the same things, while the income elasticity for pork, poultry andeggs were reversed. The fact above reflectS the impactS of modem nUtrition view in citiesare different from that in villages.The income elasticity fOr the residentS who eat outdoors is lower than 0.3.Because the major fOrms of outdoor dinners are dinners when one is on duty, groupdinners paid not by the eater directly, outdoor dinners arc still necessny. The rapidincrease of outdoor dinners is not only due to increase of income, but due to the socialdevelopmen' changes of consumption views and life 5tyles. Because the changes fromabove factors are difficult to compute, by income elastici...