Posted on 10/13/2019 5:37:08 PM PDT by Libloather
Bad news bacon lovers.
Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc., the world’s biggest pork producer, is warning that an outbreak of African swine fever wiping out hog farms in China could result in a stateside shortage of pig belly and even ham next year.
Though the crisis hasn’t impacted the U.S. market yet, that that could change as China is forced to increase imports to satisfy demand in 2020, Bloomberg reports.
The Chinese “are insatiable in their appetite for pork,” Arnold Silver, director of raw materials procurement at Smithfield, said at the Urner Barry Global Protein Summit in Chicago earlier this week.
Prior to the start of the epidemic a year ago, the Asian country a veritable superpower of pork. Experts 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," Christine McCracken, a senior analyst at RaboResearch, told NPR. "It's a massive number."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If we don’t have a strategic bacon reserve by now, why not?
Now this is a crisis!
That would be a catastrophe!
noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
One of the only things we won’t be able to blame Muslims for.
Send them The Impossible Burger. Keep the bacon.
AND, this is how the second American civil war started!
There won’t be a shortage unless some dingelheimers petition the government for price controls on bacon.
“Experts”? What “experts”? I dunn gotta show you no “experts”.
Bacon freezes well. Stock up.
Hmmmm... so this is why they agreed to buy $40 billion of our ag products. That’s a lot of bacon.
“almost a quarter of the world’s pork supply,”
Whoa! We always hear scare stories about new diseases and they seem to never live up to the hype. But that sounds serious.
Why don’t we raise pigs here in the US and keep them healthy?
Interesting. China has major food shortages at times, and yet still has a large enough surplus to export and the ability to undercut on prices.
“Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc., the world’s biggest pork producer”
—
They raise their pigstock in China-land, not the US?
Save the environment.
Make People Bacon!
Eat people. Make Bacon. Problem solved.
FYI: Smithfield was bought by a Chinese Company a while back. Your bacon is red-owned!
If the Chinese will not pay the tariffs on American pigs, it looks like cheaper bacon for us.
It’s NOT mentioned in the article the Chinese bought out Smithfield foods, they own 75%, and therefore the shortage we will have is due they are shipping it all to their country.
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