Where the world's livestock numbers come from
Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens in 2022, coloured by the flag FAOSTAT attaches to each country's figure: an official national count, the country's own estimate, an FAO imputation, or a figure from an external organisation.
Half the world's chickens are officially counted.
87 of the 184 reporting areas that filed a chicken figure filed an official national count, drawn here in near-black while the rest fade back.
For forty per cent, the FAO supplied the number.
78 reporting areas carry the imputed flag, in amber. The biggest single block is China, whose last official chicken count was in 1992.
Cattle are counted. Chickens often are not.
Switch to cattle and most of the map turns near-black. Cattle get censused in most of the world; poultry does not. The same country can be official for one species and imputed for the next.
Two things at once: how many, and where the number came from.
Colour is the head count on a log scale, one class per decade. The texture laid over a country is its flag: dots for a country estimate, a diagonal for an FAO imputation, a cross for an external source, and nothing at all for an official count. Europe files official figures at every scale, so most of it is plain; much of Africa's chicken count is a diagonal on a pale field.
Ten states filed nothing, and nothing was imputed.
Fifty-seven shapes pulse here, every one with no 2022 chicken row. Ten are European states that filed in other years, and their 618 million birds are about 2.3 per cent of the FAO's world chicken row. Including them at their nearest reported values, all official, would raise the official share to 52 per cent.