By Amy Mayer
Pork producers in the Midwest had great hope for 2020, in part because China was still rebuilding its swine herd after a devastating African swine fever outbreak. Still, the Sino-American trade war had barely cooled as the Phase 1 deal was signed early in the year, suggesting over-reliance on China could backfire.
“We’re leaving no stone unturned,” said Ted McKinney, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs. “If we can sell an extra container of pork somewhere, that’s an extra container of pork that came from somebody’s farm or ranch and that’s what we want to do.”
McKinney says some trade bailout money went into developing new markets. He sees promise in a pending trade deal with Kenya and says other African and Southeast Asian countries are also on his radar.
He spoke during the “How pork exports can save your bacon” webinar sponsored by Agri-Pulse, an agricultural media service.
“This is a challenging time. It’s a challenging time to be a farmer and I can’t sugar-coat that,” said Jan Archer of Archer Farms in North Carolina. “We are so grateful for our international markets.”
Those markets can add more than $7 per head to the total price a farmer gets for a pig, said Dermot Hayes, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. That’s because they complement the domestic consumers’ needs.
Most of the pork exported from the United States comes from parts of the pig that domestic consumers don't want.
“We like the middle parts of the animal, the loin, tenderloin, the rib and the belly,” Hayes said, “and are not big consumers of picnics or butts or hams.”
He says consumers overseas value those cuts along with the ears, tongues, and offal.
“We need those export markets to eat the pieces that we’re not as interested in and in so doing, they reduce the break-even price of producing the loin, the rib and the belly for the American consumer,” he said.
In other words, the price of bacon here is kept lower by the demand for other parts of the pig in other places.
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