SUMMARY: Food commodities in general, and red meat in particular, are essential commodities with weakly elastic demand, and in light of the rapid rise in their prices in the recent period, some consumers may consider them to be goods of the rich, and the increase in the gap in red meat may be due to the increase in domestic consumption of red meat on the one hand. On the other hand, there is insufficient local production, and fattening projects are considered of great importance in the agricultural system due to the good returns they give compared to what other agricultural projects achieve and the animal protein they provide at the national level to bridge the gap between the production and consumption of red meat, Due to the rise in feed prices during the recent period, some projects have resorted to trying to be self-sufficient in feed in order to reduce the cost by using some of the agricultural crop residues surrounding those projects and benefiting from them to provide feed to feed on on the one hand and to preserve the environment on the other hand, in addition to selling the surplus and providing income for the project, as well as Some farmer breeders carry out some small units of fodder production depending on the number they raise. The problem of the research was that society in the Arab Republic of Egypt suffers from a decrease in the per capita share of meat, especially with the high rates of population growth, which leads to an increase in needs and demand for it, which leads to an increase in its prices to such high levels that people with low incomes are unable to provide the necessary human needs for animal protein. As a result of the inability of local production to meet these increasing needs and thus relying on abroad to fill the growing meat gap.
RESULTS
The most important results were that red meat production in Egypt took a general decreasing trend by an annual amount of about 17.3 thousand tons, with an annual decrease rate estimated at about 2.1% of the average red meat production in Egypt during the period (2003-2022), amounting to about 842 thousand tons. This decrease has been proven statistically significant.
- The consumption of red meat in Egypt has taken a general decreasing trend, amounting to about 6.1 thousand tons, with an annual decrease rate estimated at about 0.5% of the average consumption of red meat in Egypt during the period (2003-2022), and the significance has not been proven statistically.
The animals that produce red meat in Egypt include cows, buffalo, sheep, goats, and camels, which were estimated at approximately 2808, 1427, 2081, 977, and 91 thousand heads in 2020, and it was shown that the numbers of both cows and buffalo remained stable in 2021 at a rate that did not exceed 0.4% over the past year. Ranking, while the numbers of goats and camels increased by 15.7% and 162.6% in 2022 for each, respectively.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1- The necessity of working to achieve self-sufficiency in red meat by returning to the veal project, but through associations and distributing two actual heads for every five acres, not distributing money.
2- The need to limit slaughters outside government slaughterhouses, while monitoring markets, especially in setting prices, whether at the wholesale or retail price level.