The need to provide policy-makers with succinct, yet informative, messages is widespread in biodiversity management, and has led to the development of various “indicators” that can serve this purpose. While global data on the status of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture (AnGR) have been made available in a number of publications, the issue of developing a global indicator for AnGR has come to prominence only relatively recently. This paper describes the policy background to these developments and reviews initiatives in AnGR indicator development at national and regional levels. It also outlines some of the issues raised at an expert meeting on indicators organized by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in January 2010. To date, AnGR indicator development has largely been restricted to Europe. Globally, options are restricted by the limited availability of data. The expert meeting favoured an indicator set that describes both the relative abundance of native versus non-native breeds and summarizes breed risk status. The former will require a new breed classification system that is acceptable to countries and applicable globally. The risk-status categories of approximately 64 percent of reported breeds are available in the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System, but a lack of regular updates of countries' breed population data means that trends cannot be described adequately at present.