Food, health, and sustainability
Whitney Peng
Karma: 96
The EA Forum should hold more debate weeks
I personally don’t believe in a right or wrong answer to any question… holding some reservation on agreeing 100% to leave room for debate!
Thank you for your response, Vasco, and appreciate the attention!
23% is a roughly accurate percentage of laying hens outside of cages globally. Numerically, this would be ~2 billion hens outside of cages. Factors that build to that number include the sizable proportion of modern cage-free production in the US, Europe, and a few smaller by volume regions (ex Oceania); sizable cage-free production in India; a large number of cage-free hens in China, even though the percentage of overall production is only ~10%; and, most importantly, in a number of countries in Asia (including major egg producing ones like Indonesia and Bangladesh) and most countries in Africa, a sizeable portion of egg production being cage-free because it is small backyard/local production that is free-range or similar.
For what it’s worth, we are not trying to make a precise numeric calculation here, just give a sense of the size of the issue of caged confinement of poultry in China. That ratio of 2x or 1.6x (depending on how you calculate it) would go down if you estimate a lower percentage of global egg production is cage-free, but it would go up if we factor in say ducks raised for meat in China, of which approximately 2 billion are also raised in similar cage systems each year and for which the same logic and opportunity described above also applies.. That ratio would also go up if we project current trends and commitments forward several years (factoring in the trend toward cage-free systems in some markets and the continued shift to caged confinement of broilers in China). Depending on which of these things we do or don’t factor in here, maybe you get 1.3x on the lowest end or 2.5x on the high end. 2x is a very loose average.
But regardless of the specific assumptions and whether that leads to 1.3x or 2.5x more birds in cages in China for meat than birds in cages for eggs globally, it probably doesn’t really matter in terms of the general purpose of the post.
Hi @Vasco Grilo🔸 , thanks for your comments! Below are some sources for those data points, and replies:
RE: The number of broiler chickens raised in China annually:
China’s Ministry of Agriculture reported there were 14.8 billion broiler chickens raised in 2024. You can see a news article on this here: https://zootecnicainternational.com/field-reports/middle-far-east/chinese-broiler-production-reaches-record-high-amid-challenges/
Similarly, you can also see here China’s National Bureau of Statistics report here on 17.4 billion poultry raised for meat: https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/sjjd/202501/t20250117_1958344.html. (Note, this number combines both chickens and ducks, thus the discrepancy with the 14.8 billion broiler chickens noted above.)
15 billion therefore appears to be the correct approximate number of broiler chickens raised per year, at least according to Chinese government statistics (which may not be perfectly accurate, but are likely more accurate than FAO estimates).
RE: the number of egg-laying hens in cages globally:
Our comment that there are twice as many chickens in broiler chickens in China as egg-laying hens in cages globally is certainly meant as a very rough estimate, and you’re right that that estimate did indeed account for the fact that egg-laying hens typically are raised for close to 18 months. (That estimate was meant to be “number of lives per year of production”, so egg-laying hen years were pro-rated by 2⁄3).
If instead we calculated on the discreet number of animals in cages per year, we estimate it would look more like 6.5 billion egg-laying hens are in cages each year globally and 10.5 billion broiler chickens in cages in China each year, and thus 1.6x as many broiler chickens in cages, as opposed to roughly 2x as many.
RE: Comparing number of animals vs number of animal years
Yes we would agree with you—ultimately, what matters is the number of animals impacted each day, and thus 1 egg-laying hen in a cage is equivalent to (in China, where broilers live a bit longer than in the West) about 6.5 broiler chickens in a cage. In terms of then adjusting for how much each animal suffers, we haven’t looked into your calculations of broilers vs egg laying hens, but agree on the importance of factoring that in.
General note:
The post was not meant to suggest that the caged confinement of broiler chickens is overall worse than the caged confinement of egg-laying hens, or to provide a quantified comparison of the suffering involved with each. We think that, overall, the suffering of egg-laying hens is surely a bigger problem, and as an organization, we spend more time and resources on ending the caged confinement of egg-laying hens. (We generated approximately 60 corporate commitments to end the use of caged eggs this year).
The goal with the post was to give a general overview of the situation for caged broiler chickens because it is relatively unknown; because it appears uniquely tractable (for the reasons described in the post), and because any way you cut it it is a very major problem (ie even if you look at it on the per day level, on any given day there are ~7 times as many broiler chickens in cages in China as there are egg-laying hens in cages in the US and EU combined.)
Thanks for sharing this, JoA! Scrambling on WWW to look for tips before my first EAG in SF—I also just don’t know what / how much to expect in the animal welfare side, given the growing attention towards AI safety (justificably important).
Will send you a message later, but curious hear what your “novel ways to help” you’re envisioning for farm animal welfare. Thanks!