FAO Food Balance Sheets (via OWID) for “Meat supply per person” (top 30 sovereign and dependent territory rows by most recent year). Values in kg per year per person (two decimals). “Supply” is not the same as actual consumption. Aggregates excluded.
Chart ready. Press play to start.
How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Meat Supply per Capita by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by Our World in Data (mostly re-published World Bank / UN public statistics) (OWID Grapher slug “meat-supply-per-person”). Values are expressed in kg per year per person.
What to watch. Follow China’s bar: from about 15 kg in the 1980s to over 60 kg today, economic growth translated straight onto the dinner table. Beside it, India barely moves from ~4 kg — religion and food culture setting the number, not income.
Caveats. “Supply” is a food-balance figure — production plus imports minus exports — not what people actually eat: waste, restaurant meals and tourist consumption are all inside it. Hong Kong’s outlier value is a product of exactly this accounting.
Trends in the data
The biggest mover in this table is Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It went from 8.70 kg in 1961 to 118.46 kg in 2023, a 13.62× increase that took it from 24th to 6th — the lowest of the 30 in 1961 is now sixth from the top. Macao also grew 4.00×, from 30.27 to 121.23 kg, moving from 14th to 5th; Samoa 4.15×, from 26.28 to 109.04 kg; and Portugal 4.95×, from 20.08 to 99.32 kg.
Countries that barely grew lost rank. Mongolia led in 1961 at 141.22 kg and is second in 2023 at 136.14 — down 5.08 kg over 62 years, the only decline among these 30. Canada fell from 7th to 26th, Iceland from 6th to 23rd, New Caledonia from 11th to 28th, Ireland from 10th to 22nd and Denmark from 8th to 16th. Once again, the higher the starting point the less headroom there was.
Hong Kong deserves a closer look. It rose from 40.76 kg in 1961 to 124.33 kg in 2000, 134.87 in 2010 and 145.26 in 2020, then fell to 107.43 kg and 14th place in 2023 — a drop of 37.83 kg, or 26%, in three years. Supply is calculated from production plus imports minus exports and other adjustments, so swings in tourism and transit trade move the figure directly. In small territories, values can shift sharply for reasons that are purely statistical.
The 30-country average doubled, from 51.38 kg in 1961 to 107.90 kg in 2023, while the spread between top and bottom narrowed from 132.52 kg to 68.09 kg — though that too is the familiar effect of selecting the top 30 by latest value, which gathers similar countries at the right-hand end. Remember that “supply” is not what was eaten: it includes waste at home and in restaurants. And because the cut excludes anything under about 90 kg, large countries such as Japan (around 50 kg), China and India do not appear — these 30 are the top of the distribution, not a picture of the world.
Trivia quiz
Why does "supply" in food statistics differ from what people actually eat?
Supply is measured at the distribution stage and includes household and food-service waste, so it overstates actual intake. (Source)
Why is livestock production, especially cattle, a concern for the environment?
It emits greenhouse gases (notably methane from cattle) and uses large amounts of land and water for feed. (Source)
Which South Asian country has very low meat supply per capita, partly for religious reasons?
India, where cattle are revered in Hinduism and the vegetarian population is among the world's largest. (Source)
Source
Our World in Data — Meat supply per person (FAO Food Balance Sheets)