Boom and Bust in China’s Pig Sector during 2018–2021: Recent Recovery from the ASF Shocks and Longer-Term Sustainability Considerations

Mingxi Han, Wusheng Yu and Francesco Clora
Additional contact information
Mingxi Han: School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Francesco Clora: Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958 Frederiksberg C, Denmark

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-18

Abstract: China’s African swine fever (ASF) outbreaks, which started in 2018, severely damaged the country’s pig and sow herds and created serious pork supply shortages. This resulted in high domestic market prices and record amounts of imports in both 2019 and 2020, but also severely impacted its domestic consumers. It casts doubts on whether China’s long-standing self-sufficiency strategy, including its recently communicated 95% self-sufficiency target, can be sustained. Recent data, however, suggest that China is experiencing a rapid recovery in pig production, leading to depressed domestic market prices. This study characterizes the recovery process and analyzes the underlying drivers, such as active responses to the ASF outbreaks, a multiple-prong government initiative towards supporting the pig producers, de facto relaxations of newly introduced environmental regulations, large increases in domestic investment, and a reorganization of the pig sector, featuring more scale operations. However, the rapid recovery has also resulted in decreasing prices, economic losses of producers, and dampened export opportunities for China’s trade partners. This paper, therefore, also analyzes these unintended consequences and explores supply-side measures that may enable the long-run viability of the self-sufficiency goal in the presence of high dependency on imported feed. Through a model-based numerical simulation analysis, we find that supply-side measures, such as yield improvement, can substantially reduce reliance on import feed but can only increase domestic pork production marginally, while technical efficiency improvement in pork production has the largest potential in boosting domestic pork production.

Keywords: African swine fever; pig production; China; sustainable development; self-sufficiency; computable general equilibrium model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/11/6784/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/11/6784/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:11:p:6784-:d:830085

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().