China is emphasizing larger, better capitalized hog production facilities that can deploy better disease management practices. Chinese farmers are taking pigs to larger size before slaughter to capture a better return in the current high-priced market. However, there are potentially permanent changes in what the Chinese eat as a side effect of the disease problem. The Chinese constitute roughly 19 percent of the world’s population and consume nearly 30 percent of the world’s beef, chicken and pork. However, that is largely due to the country’s out-sized consumption of pork. Pork disappearance in China reached its peak in 2014 and its share of global pork consumption had begun to decline before the outbreak of ASF. ...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...