How China’s pork crisis put the squeeze on struggling family pig farms

Name: China’s ongoing African swine fever epidemic is spreading across Asia
Uploaded: 2021-07-16T03:00:22.000Z
Duration: 1 min 20 s
Description: China’s ongoing African swine fever epidemic is spreading across Asia

African swine fever and subsequent pork price volatility have accelerated a structural transformation in China’s hog farming industry

Small retail farmers, the backbone of the industry for centuries, are slowly losing market share to larger agricultural corporations

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Many of China’s small pig farmers are struggling to survive due to the pork price volatility that followed African swine fever. Photo: Tai Hailun

Ji Siqi

Published: 11:00am, 16 Jul 2021Updated: 3:11pm, 16 Jul 2021

In mid June, pig farmer Liang Rixiang made the painful decision to downsize the hog farm she had been expanding for the past decade, selling four of her 10 breeding sows, two of them with babies.

Liang’s farm of 100 hogs was relatively big for her village in northeastern Liaoning province. But neither she nor her smaller neighbours could avoid the economic pressure caused by plummeting pork prices, which have dropped as much as 60 per cent since the beginning of the year.

“No matter how you raise the pigs, you lose money,” said the farmer in her 60s. “You lose money if you feed the hogs and sell them to slaughterhouses. You also lose money if you feed the sows and sell the piglets.”

Across China, hundreds of thousands of small, family-operated pig farms are struggling like Liang. While the nation’s pork supply has largely recovered from the worst of African swine fever in 2018-19, the outbreak and subsequent pressure on prices has accelerated a structural transformation in the industry, with only large farms able to tolerate falling profits and mitigate ongoing risks.

In general, the whole industry is gradually switching into the direction of large-scale production and specialisation

Pan Chenjun

“In general, the whole industry is gradually switching into the direction of large-scale production and specialisation,” said Pan Chenjun, a senior analyst focusing on agriculture at Rabobank.

African swine fever, which is not harmful to humans but is deadly to pigs, decimated China’s hog herd in 2018-19 and new variants of the virus are still killing animals.

While large agricultural corporations have been able to ride out its impact, many of China’s small retail farmers – who used to account for most of the nation’s production – are struggling to survive in an industry that has been integral to rural families for thousands of years. Even the Chinese character for “home”, or 家, originated from a drawing of a pig under a roof.

“For most farmers in the past, raising pigs was more like a type of savings,” said Yang Xidi, executive director of Yunnan Kunzhou Agriculture, an agricultural technology company. “They would put money into buying grains and feeding the pigs in normal times, and when they needed the money, they would sell them.”

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China’s ongoing African swine fever epidemic is spreading across Asia