Africa Fever latest!

Although the rapid spread of African Swine Fever (ASF) across China decimated the world’s largest swine herd in 2019, it has created significant export opportunities for the U.S. pork industry.  In the United States, recent industry expansion and low prices helped the industry export more pork to China, despite high retaliatory tariffs on U.S. pork.

After the first cases of ASF in China were reported in August 2018, the virus spread to every province by mid-2019 (see textbox for disease description and stylized facts). Assessments by industry observers suggest that the number of ASF outbreaks and losses of swine far exceeded officially reported numbers. As mentioned earlier, China’s swine herd was decimated—both by loss of infected animals as well as precautionary slaughter of entire herds by farmers worried that their animals might soon be infected. Chinese Government statistics showed a decline in swine inventory of more than 40 percent from a year earlier in October 2019, and pork output for the fourth quarter was down more than 30 percent from a year earlier. China’s National Bureau of Statistics estimated that a 97-percent increase in pork prices accounted for more than half of the 4.3-percent increase in China’s December 2019 consumer price index from a year earlier. High Chinese pork prices due to ASF losses, and relatively low U.S. pork prices due to processing-sector expansion, have created opportunities for mutually beneficial trade between China and the United States.

In the absence of a cure for ASF or an effective vaccine against it—neither of which currently exist—sector recovery is likely to be slow and protracted. For 2020, USDA data and forecasts indicate that China’s pork production will fall to 36 million metric tons (mmt), a decrease of more than 33 percent from the 54 mmt produced in 2018.

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