Chicken Meat

The global average water footprint of chicken meat is about 4330 litre/kg. The water footprint of chicken meat is smaller than the footprints of meat from beef cattle (15400 litre/kg), sheep (10400 litre/kg), pig (6000 litre/kg) or goat (5500 litre/kg).

The global water footprint of broiler chicken in the period 1996-2005 was about 255 billion m3/yr, which was 11% of the total water footprint of animal production in the world (all farm animals) (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2010, 2012).

Publications

2012	Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2012) A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products, Ecosystems, 15(3): 401-415.		Download 0.5 MB
2010	Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2010) The green, blue and grey water footprint of farm animals and animal products, Value of Water Research Report Series No.48, UNESCO-IHE.	Main Report Volume 1	Download 0.5 MB
		Appendices Volume 2	Download 4.1 MB

Global average water footprint

4325 litre/kg

82% green, 7% blue, 11% grey