The camel in the world : The main changes since 50 years
Based on the official FAO statistics, the present paper aims to propose an analysis of the current situation of camel economy worldwide and of the main trends since 1961, date of the first available international data. The main field involved the camel population, the camel milk production and consumption, the camel meat production and consumption, and finally some remarks on camel sciences today. It appears that camel population is not endangered at the world level even if there are sorne countries marked by a strong or regular decIine of its population. The camel products are regularly increased but this trend is mainly due to the increase of camel population and of slaughtering rate (for meat) or proportion of lactating animais (for milk) than ta the improvement of the productivity. Indeed, nor the carcass weight on average (183 ta 205 kgf carcass), neither the daity yield (331 ta 337 1/100 Kg LW/year) have highly changed between 1961 and 2010. Special effort has ta be done by the camel research and development for answering ta food safety challenge in arid lands. Regarding camel sciences, the number of publications involving camel is regularly increasing also, but still there is a lack of studies on important challenges regarding camel, especially in local economy, milk and meat production improvement, rnultifadorial diseases and interactions with the enviromnent.