Province Issues Pork Production Recovery Directives

China's Guangdong Province issued a set of pork supply directives calling on city and county officials to ensure pork supplies and stabilize prices:

• make land available for farms and slaughterhouses; include farms, slaughterhouses, and diseased carcass disposal facilities in annual land use plans
• ease up on over-zealous enforcement of environmental restrictions on where farms can be built
• ensure bank loans support farms and slaughterhouses and subsidize loans when feasible 
• expand insurance for sows and hogs, pay out indemnities promptly, increase payouts, and experiment with "target price" insurance for hogs
• give aid to clean up and consolidate slaughterhouses using funds from an 80-million-yuan agricultural development fund
• stop feeding restaurant waste to pigs; develop plans for collecting, transporting and treating food waste; set up demonstration projects by the end of the year
• expand city frozen pork reserves and use them to adjust supplies and stabilize pork prices
• cities must form stable supplier relationships with hog-producing districts to fill their pork supply deficits
• farms designated to supply hogs to Hong Kong and Macao must establish transport corridors with biosecurity supervision to ensure smooth operation and safety of hogs supplied to those cities.

The document requires each city to meet production targets set in a provincial 2018-2020 plan for pork supply. The provincial target was set at 35 million head in 2018, 34 million in 2019 and 33 million in 2020. Shenzhen is the only city with no production target, and Dongguan's target is only 1000 hogs/year. Guangzhou's target is 400,000 head per year, while the largest target is for Maoming at 5.13 million in 2019. Officials have city slaughter targets set in a "Mayor's Market Basket" evaluation system. Cities unable to meet the targets are ordered to set up supply bases to fill their pork deficit. 

The targets seem unrealistic in view of the decimation of the province's production capacity this year. According to another market analysis published last week the spread of the African swine fever virus has stabilized in Guangdong, but the disease is estimated to have wiped out 70 percent of the province's swine production capacity.