China Faces Pork Shortage Problem

African swine fever sickens pigs, threatening $128 billion China’s pork industry. (Flickr)

In 2019, the average price of pork increased 46.7 percent, the largest spike in prices since 2011’s swine flu outbreak, as African swine fever continues to ravage China’s pig pens.

The extent of the damage the outbreak will deal to China’s $128 billion pork industry remains unknown, but the damage is still sure to be “stunning,” according to Li Xirong, director of the China Animal Agriculture Association.

With both the Mid-Autumn Festival and the seventieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China fast approaching, government officials and pork producers are scurrying to stop the outbreak and increase supply. The crisis has reached a point where several cities have had to tap into their pork reserves to meet citizens’ demands. For example, Jinan, a city in eastern China, plans to release 1,500 metric tons of pig meat over the next month. However, while local governments have begun to dip into pork reserves, the central government has yet to do the same.

The Chinese government also launched a media campaign urging people to cut back on their pork consumption. One article has warned that “eating too much pork makes it easy to gain weight.” However, despite these efforts, “China's pork shortage will worsen in the rest of the year, but the government doesn't have effective methods to fill the gap in the short term,” according to Chen Wen, a Wanlian Securities analyst.

Due to the ongoing trade war with the United States, China turned to Europe and Brazil to compensate for its poverty of pork. Analysts estimate that China will import more than 2 million tons of pork this year.

However, potential long-term solutions are more promising. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a top national agricultural research institute, told CCTV that one potential vaccine completed lab safety and efficiency tests, paving the way for large-scale production.

The ongoing pork plight has attracted no shortage of media attention. Despite the headline-dominating trade war between the U.S. and China, there were 69 times more mainland media articles related to “pork” than “China-US trade” this past week, according to the Baidu Index, a Chinese online search tracking service equivalent to Google Trends. Online search traffic for the keyword “pig” also overtook searches of the “Hong Kong issue” during the week ending September 8. Most interestingly of all, prices of pork have risen so high that a popular internet meme proposing a new way to flaunt wealth emerged: wearing a pork belly necklace.

Some experts say the pork emergency highlights larger, structural flaws in the way China’s agricultural sector is managed, and more broadly China’s ability to centrally control vast industries. China’s pig farming industry – from slaughterhouses to processing facilities – is technologically outdated and hampered by excessive regulatory hurdles.                                                                                               

Although the Chinese government is trying to reduce pork consumption, the country still relies heavily on the meat. Not only did it account for more than 60 percent of the country’s total meat production in 2018, pork is of significant cultural importance. The stakes are high, and “for that reason, the party has a very strong incentive to literally bring home the bacon,” said Andrew Polk, an analyst at Trivium China, a Beijing-based consultancy.