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Albanian livestock crisis/ Number of heads halved in a decade, milk imports increase
2026-01-25 21:46:45 / EKONOMI&SOCIALE
The decline in livestock farming and the lack of technology on farms means that the milk processing industry is not always supplied with raw materials from Albanian farms.
In 2025 alone, factories purchased 8 million liters of milk from countries such as Hungary, Serbia, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, and Kosovo. This import abroad generated 5 million euros.
The declining indicator in livestock is a trend that has been going on for decades. If we make a comparison in the last 10 years, according to data from INSTAT, in Albania in 2014 there were 500 thousand cattle on Albanian farms, while in 2024 their number has almost halved, going to 272 thousand.
The same negative balance is also in the small livestock category, where within the same period, there are 1 million fewer sheep and goats in livestock establishments.
Meanwhile, the number of birds has decreased by 2 million 501 thousand during this decade.
The only positive values are seen in beekeeping, where the number of bee families has increased by 3,000 hives. The abandonment of livestock farming is a consequence of the wrong policies that the Ministry of Agriculture has pursued over the years for this sector.
The subsidy per head has not convinced the villagers to engage in their breeding, because this form of support does not justify the costs of milk production, while the factories seek to obtain the milk at a much lower price, which amounts to 54 lek.
Faced with these conditions, the dairy by-products on the Albanian table originate from countries in the region, where 1 L of imported milk costs approximately 10 lek less than 1 L of milk from Lushnja./ Top Channel
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