While pork and beef once vied for the lead in global meat production, pork has emerged in the past two decades as the uncontested leader, largely due to production increases in China, the nation that produces and consumes half the world's pork. At 85 million tons, pork production last year was easily a third higher than beef and poultry production. Mutton, including sheep and goats, is a distant fourth in the global meat hierarchy. While meat consumption is on the rise everywhere, the type of meat consumed varies widely across cultures, with most nations focusing on a single type of meat. For example, pork dominates meat intake in many European nations and China.
Beef reigns in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil.
In South Africa and various East Asian nations, chicken tops meat consumption. Mutton provides the meat for diets in countries such as Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. And in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, mutton rivals beef as the principal source of meat. Worldwide, the production of beef and mutton depends heavily on a natural system-rangelands. Since these lands are too arid or too steeply sloping to be plowed, meat production is the only option for generating food from these ecosystems.