About 1.5 billion pigs a year
The world slaughtered close to 1.5 billion pigs for meat in 2024, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)1. That is about 47 pigs every second, or 4.1 million a day.
Pigs are a small share of the animals killed for meat, far behind chickens, but pork is one of the world’s biggest meats by weight. Each pig gives around 96 kilograms of meat3, and together they produced 125 million tonnes of pig meat in 2024, second only to poultry4.
The number has grown about fourfold since 1961, when 376 million pigs were slaughtered. But over the last decade it has barely moved, growing only about 0.2% a year1, for reasons that have more to do with disease than with appetite.
Nearly half of the world’s pigs are slaughtered in China
China slaughtered 703 million pigs in 2024, 47% of the world total1. That is roughly one pig for every two people in the country10, and no other country comes close.
The United States is a distant second with 130 million pigs, followed by Brazil (58 million), Vietnam (57 million), Spain (54 million), Russia (49 million) and Germany (45 million)1. Spain’s place on that list is striking for a country of fewer than 50 million people10: it slaughters more pigs than any other country in the European Union1.
Six months from birth to slaughter
A pig raised for meat usually lives about five to six months. It takes around 22 to 26 weeks for a piglet to grow to slaughter weight5, after which it is sent to the abattoir.
That's how many pigs are slaughtered for meat every day around the world
At any moment there are about 962 million pigs alive on the world’s farms2. Because most are slaughtered within half a year, the herd is replaced more than once every year.
Life in a sow stall
The sharpest welfare questions concern the mother pigs, called sows, which are kept to give birth to litter after litter. On many industrial farms, pregnant sows are kept in sow stalls (also called gestation crates): metal pens so narrow that the sow cannot turn around, sometimes for most of her pregnancy.
The European Union has restricted the practice. Since 2013, EU farms may keep sows in individual stalls only during the first four weeks of pregnancy, and must keep them in groups after that6. In 2021, after more than 1.4 million Europeans signed a citizens’ initiative called End the Cage Age, the European Commission promised a law to phase out cages for farmed animals by the end of 20237. That deadline passed, and the proposal has still not been published8.
Crowded indoor farms also rely heavily on antibiotics to keep disease in check, which is covered on the page for antibiotics used on farm animals.
The virus that wiped out 40% of China’s pigs
The biggest recent shock to the pig count was not a law or a change in diet, but a virus. African swine fever cannot pass to people, but in pigs it is deadly: infected animals die within one to two weeks, and in some outbreaks every infected pig dies. It was first reported in China in August 2018 and reached every province by mid-2019. By October 2019, China’s pig herd was more than 40% smaller than a year earlier, and the US Department of Agriculture expected Chinese pork production in 2020 to be a third lower than in 20189.
The effect shows up clearly in the world total. Global pig slaughter fell from 1.48 billion in 2018 to 1.33 billion in 2019 and 1.32 billion in 2020, before recovering to 1.49 billion by 20241. China turned to imported pork to fill the gap9.
Pigs are one part of this total: every land animal slaughtered for meat this year.
Land animals slaughtered for meat
Globally, this year
Where pig farming is heading
Pork has lost its place at the top. Poultry overtook pig meat as the world’s most produced meat in 20164, and chicken is expected to keep growing faster. That is one reason the number of pigs slaughtered has flattened while chicken keeps climbing: a lot of the new demand for meat, especially in Asia, is going to chicken rather than pork.
The next decade will probably depend on two things. The first is disease. African swine fever showed how a single virus can cut the world’s pig slaughter by a tenth in one year, and large, crowded farms give such outbreaks a lot of room to spread. The second is China: with nearly half the world’s pigs, any change in how much pork Chinese families eat, or in how China’s farms are run, moves the global number more than anything that happens in Europe or America.
All meat produced this year, pork included.
The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.
