Posted on 05/15/2019 10:16:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
* China is grappling with a widespread African swine flu (ASF) epidemic, a disease fatal to pigs but harmless to humans.
* ASF's effects on pigs are gruesome. Symptoms include diarrhea, depression, and miscarriages.
* The government is urging farmers to cull infected pigs to prevent the spread of the disease, which is in turn dramatically decreasing the country's pork production.
* Dutch bank Rabobank estimates that the country will kill 150 million to 200 million pigs — or one third of the country's supply — this year.
* China is the world's largest pork producer and consumer. The steep fall in pork production in China and likely rise in Chinese demand will likely drive up global pork prices, researchers say.
China is expected to kill about a third of all pigs in the country this year due to an outbreak of the gruesome and incurable disease, African swine flu (ASF), which will likely drive up pork prices around the world.
African swine flu has spread to almost every province in mainland China since Beijing's agriculture ministry confirmed the first outbreak in the northeastern Liaoning province, which borders North Korea, in August 2018.
The disease, which is deadly to pigs but harmless in humans, has since spread to the southern Chinese island of Hainan as well as to other Asian countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mongolia, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Some 1.02 million pigs have been culled in China so far in an effort to prevent the spread of the disease, China's agriculture ministry reported last month.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
They already bought SMITHFIELD a year or 2 ago.
Forty five years ago African swine flu (ASF) was in Cuba. The US was trying to get Mexico to stop imports of pork from Cuba as they were worried the disease might get into the USA.
We have them here in northern Mi too. They hang them on buck poles.
How about medicine?
Not if you have a choice.
No kung pow Port for you China—better make a deal with Trump now. It will only get worse after 2020.
China has always had high tariffs on imports from the US.
How do tariffs on imports *from* China hurt him?
To put into proper perspective, 1/3 of China’s slaughter-ready hogs will be killed and buried. According to a poster on SCMP.com, all the slaughter-ready hogs in the world does not equal the # of hogs China will kill and bury in the next 12-18 months.
Just when pork is about the only affordable meat. :(
I suggested to my husband we raise a hog, but he vetoed the idea. (We live on a 55’x 150’ city lot).
Who do you think owns Smithfield? They’ll just take our pigs.
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