Pigs and chickens and the US/China trade deal

The US news is full of political nonsense while the real stories are being ignored.

for example, the Democratic kerfuffle/fantasy and talk of impeachment has undermined the US/China trade talks (not to mention negotiations with North Korea). This is a good argument for putting Fox news on cable in Asia so other governments can discern reality from political spin (we have CNNPhil, Fox, BBC, and AlJezeerah on our local cable, plus local news shows and news on the Korean and Japanese English language stations).

One aspect of the China trade war discussion is the implication that China might fight back against US tariffs by refusing to import US food. This is being spun as Trumpieboy's fault  by the press for political reason. But things are more complicated than that.

Complicating this story is the recent decimation of China's pig population due to African swine flu.

The SCMP reports something usually left out in the US politicized MSM: That China's pig population is in the midst of an African swine flu epidemic.

China’s African swine fever outbreak and US trade war combine to create perfect storm for Chinese economy Beijing placed 50-70 per cent tariffs on US pork imports to punish farm states that support US President Donald Trump But with African swine fever threatening 200 million pigs, the biggest consumer of pork in the world is facing a shortage as demand and prices rise

China's tariffs on US pork is making pork too expensive for locals to buy. And a more affluent China uses a lot more pork than in the past.

And the trade deal which is supposed to increase soy bean imports from the USA now hits a snag because much of this is fed to pigs, but now there are fewer pigs to feed.

read the entire article for the economic analysis. China's pigs are usually produced in smaller farms, which complicates the matter. Not to mention the coverups and corruption that mean the reports might not be accurate.

Luckily, so far the Philippines hasn't been hit: pork imports are banned from infected countries to stop the spread here.

The bad news? Bans don't stop illegal smuggling. And it would only take one infected pig to decimate our pig population.

The Manila Times discusses.

The epidemic began as a minor outbreak among 400 hogs in Shenyang last year, and has spread despite efforts by Chinese officials to keep it in check.

So far this year, about one million hogs have been culled, and experts are estimating that at least 100 million will be exterminated this year. The US Department of Agriculture has forecast that China will lose 134 million hogs this year between the disease and efforts to stop it; that is almost twice the entire pig population of the US. The first effect of the epidemic sent global pork prices soaring...

so what does this mean for the Philippines? Will we take advantage of the anti US tariffs on pigs and export our pigs to China?

Ah but that would mean a pig shortage here, and higher prices for our folks.

One result is that China is now switching to Chicken for their meat needs.

SCMP notes that US and many European countries had Bird flu in their poultry, so China has banned imports from these countries until recently.

The answer of course is to breed more chickens in China. But there is also a glitch here :

China relies on imported breeding stock for production of white-feathered broiler chickens, which account for more than half the country’s chicken supply. 

We used to run a chicken farm and yes, we raised the white feathered broilers for local restaurants. We would be sent thousands of one day old chicks and feed them up, and then after 60 days harvest them.

Alas, we never made a profit because it was cheaper to import chickens from Vietnam, whose wages were lower. And then the chicken houses were flattened by a passing typhoon, so we didn't rebuild: instead we decided to concentrate on our organic brown rice.

However, this area still has quite a few chicken farms to supply the nearby Manila area.

The Philippines is off the migrating bird corridors, so we were bird flu free for quite awhile, until Bulacan got an epidemic in poultry (ducks, guinea fowl and chickens) in 2017. The epidemic was quickly controlled so we are now bird flu free.and can export chickens and eggs. But broiler exports are down and may never recover. LINK

the Poultrysite has an article on the pork/chicken dilemma in China, and goes into technical details.

the greens hate "big agri" and are probably happy about this, and it is true that this shows the weakness of uniculture in Chickens. However, the greens don't have a viable alternatives to supply cheap protein foods to the growing poor inner city populations (insisting on only free range chicken would be too few and too expensive to do this).

But uniculture means easier spread of disease.A lot of this is technical, so I won't go into cross breeding and breeding native chickens with the help of gov't subsidies, and I won't go into the GM genes that could make mass chicken farms resistant to bird flu and other diseases.

So what is the alternative? Fish? Tofu? The answer is that the poor will develop protein malnutrition and be vulnerable to epidemics, not to mention political unrest.

This article summarizes the world wide spread and the consequences of the swine flu epicemic. and notes that so far there is no vaccine to stop the spread, so quarantine and killing the infected pigs is the only way to stop the spread.

the only  good news in all of this is that the experts say that African Swine flu cannot spread to humans.

unless, of course, the virus mutates...