Issues in the Development of the Livestock Sector in Kazakhstan

Livestock is an important branch of agriculture of Kazakhstan. It produces 47% of the volume of gross agriculture product. The importance of this branch is determined not only by its high share in agricultural gross domestic product, but also its great influence on the economy of agriculture and is essential as foodstuffs producer for domestic and foreign consumers. However this sector faces many problems. During the years of economic reforms in Kazakhstan, the consumption of meat and meat products decreased significantly. In 1992, meat consumption per capita was 68 kg, in 2004 - 45 kg, or decreased by 33.8%. In present time, before the agro-industrial complex in Kazakhstan is the task of rapid development and intensification of the livestock industries, as well as improve the efficiency of processing of raw meat. Efficient processing of raw meat provides not only an increase in the profitability of products, increase profits of the meat industry, but also increase production of high domestic food available to consumers. In turn, the growth in demand for domestic products is an important incentive to increase production of the required quality of meat in agriculture. Thus, the efficiency of meat processing is of great socio-economic importance, which determines the relevance of research in this area. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).