China has no choice but to exempt American agricultural products.
An epidemic of African Swine Fever is sweeping through China’s hog farms, and the effects are rippling across the globe, because China is a superpower of pork. Half of the world’s pigs live in China — or at least they did before the epidemic began a year ago.
“Every day, we hear of more outbreaks,” says Christine McCracken, a senior analyst at RaboResearch, which is affiliated with the global financial firm Rabobank.
McCracken and her colleagues now estimate that by the end of 2019, China’s production of pork could be cut in half. “That’s roughly 300 million to 350 million pigs lost in China, which is almost a quarter of the world’s pork supply,” she says. “It’s a massive number.” (This measures the reduction in pigs slaughtered annually, which is roughly twice the number of animals in China’s swine herd at any one time.)
Two comments. I lived in Hong Kong and we had to avoid Chinese pork and chicken products routinely... like every other month.
Secondly, I worked on a hot farm and breeder. It takes exactly 4 months from breeding, birth/gestation and finishing to make bacon. Thus, given a female Sal population to breed it would or should not take more than 3-6 months to recover. Chickens are a similar timeframe from incubation, sorting spots and finishing meat or laying population’s.
China’s problem is in sanitary conditions and law enforcement of agriculture standards.
I could could fly to China today and turn those two situations into world class competition crushing economic sectors in 9 months... But I would harm American farm families and own extended family.