I wouldn’t trust the Chinese as far as I could throw them. My dad grew up in China and said the only thing they care about is money
I’m neither Chinese nor a potential alpaca breeder, but it’s news to me that alpacas are bred stateside as anything other than pets. In the past, the word most associated with “alpaca” has been “scam”. A casual Google search revealed that another key word is “subsidy”:
http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2010/dec/24/uncle-sam-will-help-buy-you-an-alpaca/
Their intent is obvious.
They’ve done the same thing to nearly every industry that we once dominated, i.e. garlic etc.
I think they still resent that Jesuit priest who smugled silk worms out of China centuries ago.
Before they can be considered mainstream livestock, there needs to be a ready market for the products.
Were I to have a pack of alpacas, I would have no local source to sell the fiber, meat, or the animals.
With cows, pigs, and goats, there are local, scheduled sales. No guessing where to sell or what the market price is, the state publishes weekly average market prices on these livestock.
For now, this market is another Emu industry, sounds good and lots of hype, but the thrust of the market is for current owners to sell breeding pairs for profit. Once that market is saturated, it will collapse like the Emu market did.
The Bolivians called and they want you to stop raising their alpacas.
Thanks for the very informative post/thread.
Would not surprise me
Biggest problem is that we have Free Trader Communists in the US who blindly support Free Trade with Communist China...and encourage the continued failed policies with Communist China. You can bet if the Communist Chinese destroyed the Goat-Herding market with their practices, they will sure do it with Alpacas
We need to strengthen American markets in all areas. Its better to have strong tariffs and paychecks than high income taxes and welfare checks.
Perhaps they can get the Chinese interested in Emus.
Back when the United States did that sort of thing to the rest of the world in the 1950's, it was called "smart business".
From an agricultural sense, alpacas could make sense.
That is, if you look at a nation’s land, it can be subdivided in parts: urban, good arable land which is flat and has water, marginal land which is either flat or has water, and generally unusable land which is mountainous or desert.
Unfortunately urban competes with good arable land, which reduces the available farmland, so the focus becomes how to make the marginal land more productive, and how to produce at least something useful in the otherwise unusable land.
Because there is a lot of desert, but generally limited amounts of fresh water, the emphasis in marginal land is to use it for production that is less water intensive, yet can be cost effective to transport some distance to urban areas.
In China’s case, it intends to make truly gigantic water dams to provide water to its immense (500,000 square mile) Gobi desert.
Mountains, unless you have no choice but to create terraces, usually for rice, the preferred agriculture is hardy mountain animals. But China has an abundance of high altitude mountains as well, especially in its territory of Tibet.
So for that, Alpacas present a very reasonable alternative.
Dear Chinese: It is a well known fact that the animal with the best hair for making clothing is the Grizzly Bear. They are gentle, lovable creatures that enjoy nothing more than a good scratch behind the ear. They are also quite tasty. The best way to tenderize them, is to hit them with a bamboo cane while they are sleeping. If you want one for a pet, then just pour some bacon grease over yourself and give the bear a hug. Best wishes!
It would be interesting to know if those students were majoring in either agriculture or business, or whether they were just doing investigation for people back home.
It's probably accurate to say that what the Chinese can do they will do. They are very aggressive competitors in every field of business where they can gain a foothold. And of course trade laws and circumstances are probably tilted in their favor. But perhaps there are Alpaca farmers in Peru who are lamenting how the Americans got involved
I would think that the biggest concern would be the degredation of the the stock by indiscriminate Chinese breeding. When the Spanish entered Peru, the slaughtered most of the alpacas for meat and for control of the population that depended upon them. When they did that, they destroyed breeding lines literally thousands of years old, many of which produced incredibly fine fleece.
Americans have been working very hard to bring up the quality of the remaining lines, to produce better fleece. It’s long, hard work, and a huge part of alpaca breeding. The problem with selling alpaca fibers is that while it’s wonderful in many ways, the quality is not yet fine enough to compete as an alternative to silk or the finest wools - though it’s close. Samples of ancient alpaca fleece, however, show that this level of competition is definitely possible.
Enter the Chinese. Does anyone believe for a second that they will be interested in this breeding quality endeavor, when they could just approach the industry from a volume perspective, to supply fleece through a massive, uncontrolled breeding?