(S1E2) Pig news: from dry to sensational
- Yue
- Nov 22, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 2, 2020
News about hogs in China has evolved from dry statistics for high-end news consumers sitting in a policymaking meeting to a sensational topic even for retired aunties’ daily gossip gathering just around the corner.
Pork used to be my favourite kind of meat on the dinner table (now is fish): pork dumpling, Sichuan style double-cooked pork belly (really spicy but so yum), pork meatball tomato soup… oh yes, those are my comfort food. I remember when I was still a little girl in primary school, one of my highlights in summer holiday was to go to the farmer's market with my grandma. She tended to buy fresh raw meat in a butcher on a daily basis claiming the fridge does not work properly to keep the right flavour. As a short-temper old lady, she always bargained with the sellers at the stall and demanded quite strictly about the particular part of the swine that she believed is the best. Grandma’s bargains, the smell of raw pork, butcher’s sharp knife to slice the meat within a blink of eyes, the sound of a fly buzzing… those are some of my memories of hot and wet summer in childhood.
As much as I love eating pork, I never follow pig news that often. Apart from the dry and rigid pork price statistics releases, I would never have imagined that hogs could make news, all kinds of news. Some of them are unexpectedly so intriguing and sensational just like this one:
Man steals from butcher after pork prices increase dramatically in China, SCMP
That is… eye-opening…
Anyways, the background is, in short, the spread of African swine fever caused the pork price soaring in China. Here are some of the news coverages for your information:
African Swine Fever, Reuters
China’s pork shortage could give US farmers a chance to cash in, CNBC
To say the least, Chinese people love pork. In a local Chinese restaurant, meat is almost a synonym for pork. Without very specifically pointing out the type of meat that you want, there is a very high chance that the meat dish will serve with pork in it.
With the deep pork fever, the market itself can be fluctuated and vulnerable. What if one day the meat supply runs low? What if there is a disease, just like ASF, striking the farms?
The pain looks real…
In order to understand Chinese pork market, a primary question to ask is: why pork is so popular in China and thus becomes a dominant dish? This is actually turned out to be a harder question to address than I have imagined. As a Chinese, I simply don't know why. I feel it's just an inborn preference. Or shall we say, because everyone else does so? After a reasonable scale of research based on literature review, only certain factors captured can provide some of the explanations. Firstly, Cheng et al. (2011) highlight that generally speaking, there is an increasing demand for “high quality and low-cost animal protein”. Modern lifestyle requires more frequent and intensive take-in of nutrition and protein to cope with more challenges and pressures compared with the situation decades ago.
To address the increasing demand, people would turn to more efficient meat producers. In China, it happens to be that swine is the primary farm animal. Pigs are very efficient meat generator compared with grazing animals such as cattle or sheep. This creates more advantages for consuming pork: it is delicious; it is high in protein; it has higher meat availability ratio; it echoes the limitation of arable farmland in China due to various reasons: urbanisation, land degradation, erosion and so on. In other words, hogs are amazing. Pigs are easier to maintain and require fewer land use (Geissler, 1999; Cheng et al., 2011). What a win-win!
As a matter of fact, the space needed to raise pigs can be much more efficient than you can possibly imagine. This actually reminds me of my most organic toilet experience in the countryside. You see, when I was a kid, we visited my dad’s hometown (a remote village in Sichuan) once a year for tomb sweeping in Spring Festival (kind of a tradition). I was always led to the family’s pigpen with a bold, deep and chilly hole on the floor leading to God knows where when asking for WC. The next scene was that I was left alone in the dark room with pigs making noise next to me or eating with an awkward sound along the edge of the fence. As a little girl, I was terrified and also had to solve my urgent problem. So, I squat and did it anyway. I couldn’t figure out, at that time, what was exactly going on in a room like that. Do pigs eat anything anywhere anyway?
That dark room is, in fact, quite common in China’s countryside, at least at that time. There are three types of pigs’ farm: “small (including backyard farms, < 50 head), medium (50-3,000 head), and large (> 3,000 head)” (Cheng et al., 2011, p. 167). The small swine farms are the most popular and scatter across the country. They have low production aiming only for self-sufficient: domestic or very limited local market consumption.
With the popularity of pork, there are also risks and challenges looming around. For example, first of all, as more and more “modern industrial swine farms” operating in regions with high population density, environmental problems are pressing: water, soil, air pollution, manure waste and so on (Brubaker, 2004). Secondly, in fact, more than half of the grain products in China are for animals feeding (USDA, 2007). That is to say, pork market and feed-grain market are closely connected with each other. If there are challenges imposed in the latter market due to decreased arable land, water shortages, climate change, certain natural disasters, certain trade disputes and so on, hogs market will find it quite difficult to escape the damages (Cheng et al., 2011; Zhou, Tian and Malcolm, 2008).
Facing challenges, people might say, ok, it’s fine. With the current international trade scope and powerful WTO trade framework on board, we can turn to pork imports to enhance the strategic meat security. This, inevitably, leads to another interesting topic: what if there is a trade dispute going on? More news for your digestion:
Trade war with U.S. won't affect China's pork supply: Chinese ministry, Reuters
Swine Fever? Trade War? China Turns to Strategic Pork Reserve, The New York Times
Alright. Luckily, pork reserve is here to keep Chinese people’s dinner table as satisfying as always. The frozen raw pork is reported to be stored “at the state-mandated temperature of minus-18 degrees Celsius, or just under zero degrees Fahrenheit” (The New York Times, 2019). No single piece of meat can stay for more than four months. Customers say that the reserve pork tastes just fine. That is good to know.
In the end, as I was browsing around some references I collected for this blog, I read a research finding by Ma et al. (2016, p.773) concerning Chinese people’s preference in pork consumption in relating to the "just fine" taste of reserve pork. The survey says “the attributes fresh, lean, imported from countries other than China, expensive, and skin packaged are highly valued by Chinese consumers when choosing pork and evaluating pork quality. Both intrinsic and extrinsic attributes influence the perception of pork quality, and therefore a better understanding of these attributes may help the meat industry improve China’s competitive meat market.” In this case, is it fair to say as a matter of fact, maybe local people wound still prefer fresh raw hogs? Or even better, the fresh raw hogs just being nicely sliced on the butcher's table with its fresh smell and color, just like my grandma insists?
I know I love pork, especially crispy pork belly, whether it is Sunday roast in UK or my grandma’s spicy wok fry in Sichuan. News about hogs in China has evolved from dry statistics for high-end news consumers sitting in a policymaking meeting to a sensational topic even for retired aunties’ daily gossip gathering just around the corner. The thing is with just a little bit human touch, you will be surprised to find out how many boring news reports can be turned into something this juicy and relevant. That’s part of the reason I love good news.
References & Credits:
Brubaker, D. 2004. Trade and growth of animal agriculture in the world international competition: The China model. In: Local and global considerations in animal agriculture: The big picture, 22 September 2004, Washington, DC., pp. 5-8.
Cheng, H.W. et al. 2011. Pork production system and its development in mainland China. International Journal of Fisheries and Aquaculture, 3(8), pp.166-174.
CNBC
Geissler, C. 1999. China: the soyabean-pork dilemma. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 58(2), pp. 345–353.
Ma, X.Q. et al. 2017. Which product characteristics are preferred by Chinese consumers when choosing pork? A conjoint analysis on perceived quality of selected pork attributes. Food science & nutrition, 5(3), pp.770-775.
Reuters
SCMP
The New York Times
USDA. 2007. China, Peoples Republic of, Grain and Feed Annual 2007. [online]. Washington, DC.: USDA. Available from: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/gainfiles/200703/146280323.pdf [Accessed 23 October 2019].
Zhou, Z.Y., Tian, W.M. & Malcolm, B. 2008. Supply and demand estimates for feed grains in China. Agricultural Economics, 39(1), pp.111-122.
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