Global meat supply transitions and emission heterogeneity: cross-national patterns, food security implications, and pathways to sustainable food systems

Rising incomes are reshaping global meat supply, with major implications for food security and climate targets, yet the extent to which cross-sectional patterns can forecast within-country trajectories remains contested. We assemble a harmonised panel of apparent meat-type-specific supply (FAO Food Balance Sheets), GDP, urbanisation, and population for 40 countries over 1990–2019 (1,191 country-year observations), combining a cross-sectional logistic morphology, bracket-specific fixed-effects panel estimation, emission counterfactual accounting, and residual analysis. The cross-sectional income–meat relationship is S-shaped (inflection point USD 12.7K; asymptote 82.5 kg/capita/year), but within-country conditional income associations are positive in every GDP bracket (0.13–0.67), rising across the first four development stages, remaining positive at 0.64 in the highest bracket, and contradicting naïve extrapolation of saturation curves. The global shift from red meat to poultry reduced estimated per-capita meat-related greenhouse gas emissions by 16.8% relative to a 1990-composition counterfactual, but the gain varies from 11.3% in pork-dominated systems to 19.0% in beef-dominated systems. Systematic residuals reflect cultural, religious, and policy-driven dietary constraints. Cross-sectional saturation curves cannot be naïvely extrapolated to forecast within-country trajectories, and national meat-basket composition matters as much as consumption level for carbon accounting and food-security planning.