Since the swine fever crisis, domestic oversupply has depressed the wholesale pork price in China, which has hovered around 20 renminbi ($3) per kilogram over the last year, down by around a third from three years ago.
…if you can sell these other parts of the pig that are less valuable than the good cuts of muscle and recoup some of that money by selling it to the Chinese market, that can be really important to staying profitable.
Darin Friedrichs, director of agricultural consulting firm Sitonia Consulting
“You have changing dietary habits as well where pork is not as popular as it used to be, although it’s still by far the biggest consumer protein,” says Friedrichs. “Before, we would typically get big increases in demand around the holidays — National Day, Spring Festival — and in the past few years, we haven’t seen much of the big surge in demand around those holidays.”
The period of recovery since the ASF crisis has reduced demand for pork imports into China, which fell by more than 75 percent between May 2021 and May 2024, according to government data. That trend has lessened European pig producers’ dependency on China, whose share of EU pork exports declined from 55 percent in 2020 to 30 percent in 2023, according to figures from Netherlands-based Rabobank.
“Still, China remains the single biggest market for EU pork,” says Éva Gocsik, senior analyst in animal protein at the bank, said in a recent research note. “Hence, any trade restriction, such as a higher import duty, would unfavorably impact the EU pork market.”
Such an impact would be most keenly felt in the market for pig offal — organs such as the liver, kidneys and brains. The EU exported about 600,000 metric tons of offal to China in 2023, representing about half of the bloc’s pork exports there, according to Rabobank.
“Those are parts of the animal that are not very popular in Europe, or even in Brazil or the U.S., so a lot of that gets sold to China,” says Friedrichs. “Normally, raising pigs is not massively profitable, so if you can sell these other parts of the pig that are less valuable than the good cuts of muscle and recoup some of that money by selling it to the Chinese market, that can be really important to staying profitable.”
Under World Trade Organization rules, China’s pork probe should be completed within one year, though Beijing could impose temporary restrictions on EU pork imports while the investigation is ongoing. On June 22, China’s commerce minister Wang Wentao met with the European Commission’s Valdis Dombrovskis to discuss the EU’s anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EVs, in a sign that a negotiated solution might still be possible.
“We believe this is a political, retaliatory move from China…. rather than a well-founded concern about dumping of pork meat,” says Gocsik from Rabobank. “It is possible that the new European Commission and Parliament may seek to do a deal with China to reduce tariffs on electric vehicle imports in exchange for ongoing access to China’s market for pork exports.”
Aaron Mc Nicholas is a staff writer at The Wire based in Washington DC. He was previously based in Hong Kong, where he worked at Bloomberg and at Storyful, a news agency dedicated to verifying newsworthy social media content. He earned a Master of Arts in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Dublin City University in Ireland.
