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China fine-tunes pork reserve system as panic selling and sluggish demand send prices tumbling
- Pork prices have fallen more than 50 per cent since mid-January amid sluggish demand and panic selling due to new African swine fever outbreaks
- To combat the price volatility and stabilise production, Beijing announced it would improve its monitoring of the market and tap strategic pork reserves
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Plummeting prices for China’s favourite meat mean a lot of the pigs that trader Zhang Yu is seeing in the market these days are supersized, or at least a little overweight.
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Low prices driven by sluggish demand and panic selling over African swine fever outbreaks are causing many farmers to hold onto their herds, and fatten them up, in the hope prices will rebound.
“If they sell at the current price, they will certainly lose money,” said Zhang, who lives in a small town in the northeastern province of Liaoning.
“Many pigs weigh more than 150kg now,” he said. “If you sell one below 150kg, the money you get can’t even cover the expense of buying a piglet.”
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The price of pork in China, the world’s leading consumer, has plunged more than 54 per cent since mid-January, touching 21.5 yuan (US$3.4) per kilogram as of last Friday, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
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