Role of dairy buffalo in Egypt food security

The results showed that the average farm gate price of both milk and meat from buffalo was less than the average international market, but it was much lesser for milk than meat. Therefore, the development plan should focus upon raising buffalo milk productivity, particularly that milk price projection, as shown in the introduction, would reach 2.5 folds its current level due to speed demand increase and slow production growth. Among the major targets towards raising milk productivity from the Egyptian buffaloes herd are the annual milk yield per milking head and the herd structure, particularly the proportion of milking herd in the stock. Although milk yield per milking buffalo has raised from 940 kilograms in 1990 to about 1402 in 2006, and at a higher annual growth rate of 2.5%, than the world average (2%), it was less than the comparable milk yield level of the world average. The world aggregate average reached only 1537 kilograms per milking buffalo in 2006, i.e. higher than the same year average of Egypt by 8.8%, (Table10), (Figure 1). Although the proportion of the milking buffaloes in the total herd of Egypt was significantly higher than the world average (Table 11) along the last two decades (Figure 2), it has shown a rate of decrease by about -0.6% a year. In addition, the optimum milking heads proportion in total herd structure should be 50%, (Mohammed Sharaf, Ibrahim Soliman & Ahmed Seleem, 1987). Accordingly as the percentage of milking buffaloes in the Egyptian stock reached 42% in the year 2006, such percentage should be raised by 19% above its current level to approach 50%. Therefore, if the development plan oriented the credit policies, veterinary care programs and feeding plan of buffaloes towards reaching the target improvement of buffalo milk productivity, the total milk production of Egypt would be raised by about 29%.