The announced trade agreement with China may have been driven by the African Swine Fever rather than political considerations.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Chinese side hasn’t provided details of the negotiations, including that it will buy up to $50 billion of U.S. farm products, the level Trump’s trade team says Beijing will reach yearly. If achieved annually, that would be substantially above levels near $21 billion that prevailed in 2017 before the trade war and then were subsequently reduced by China as tensions mounted.
Mr. Trump touted the purchases in a tweet Saturday.
“The deal I just made with China is, by far, the greatest and biggest deal ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country,” he said. “In fact, there is a question as to whether or not this much product can be produced? Our farmers will figure it out. Thank you China!”
The Farm Journal’s JoAnn Alumbaugh reports on the swine disease is rampant in Asia and spreading to Europe:
African swine fever (ASF) is like a recurring nightmare that won’t get out of your head. You can’t sleep at night and you can’t stop thinking about it during the day, because should the virus enter the U.S., your future as a pork producer would radically change….
1. The spread continues: According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Veterinary Bureau in China released statistics last week showing a 38.7% decrease in the number of live pigs and a 37.4% decrease in the number of breeding sows in China for August 2019 over the same period last year. Many observers of the situation in China believe the actual numbers to be much higher. The FAO also reported that within the last month, ASF has spread to new locations in Vietnam, North and South Korea, Lao PDR, Cambodia and The Philippines.
Bloomberg states that 80% of protein consumption in North Korea is from pork and the country may be hiding a “Hog Apocalypse”.
Humans are not susceptible to African Swine Fever, but it spreads rapidly in hogs and can kill the animal within a week.
The US Department of Agriculture is being dismantled when they would be our firewall to halt fight this crisis. The disease has not been reported here but once it hits anywhere in North America our six million feral swine would spread it widely if it didn’t go straight to the farms.
China consumes almost half of the pork produced in the world. Two thirds of the meat consumed is pork. Loss of a third to a half of the pork production would be devastating and disruptive to the country.
It is frighting to think what could happen in North Korea if the nuclear power was pushed from widespread hunger to country wide famine.
Our country could address the problem better without the “stable genius” we have for a leader.