1.11.1 Relation in the developed countries (2024)

So what are current changes that may have a reflection on animal breeding? One big difference in the developed world today, compared to 30 years ago, is that people are relatively rich and/or food has become relatively cheap. They only spend a small percentage of their income for buying food as can be seen in this figure for the 8 countries that spend less than 10% of their income on food :

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In the western world, there is an increasing concern of people for how their food was produced. It should be healthy and natural and produced locally. In addition, animal products should also be produced welfare friendly. In our culture, this is considered very normal, but it is a definite sign of wealth that people can afford to care about these issues. Recently, there is a lot of awareness about the consequences of climate change and the role of greenhouse gas emissions from animal production systems. And in Western Europe the effect of nitrogen emissions on the quality of nature reserves and water quality became an important point of concern. Thus in the developed world the number of societal conditions for animal production systems are increasing affecting also the directions for animal breeding activities.