Chinese authorities are aggressively rolling out their rice price support policy as prices plummet under harvest pressure. While authorities are stockpiling surplus domestic rice, the high Chinese price is attracting a surge of imported rice from India and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile China is dumping cheap rice in Africa. The price support program, a centerpiece of China's "food security" policy, ultimately results in confusion and fills markets with low-quality products--the opposite of Xi Jinping's exhortation to raise the quality of Chinese products. As the Fall harvest shifts into high gear, China's communist party "Red Net" news site explained this week that an aggressive roll-out of the Chinese rice price support program is needed to stem a 3-year 11.9% decline in rice prices, especially for long-grain (indica) rice harvested in the Fall. Between October 14 and 20 six of China's rice-producing provinces launched government-backed price support ...
China's swine producers have cut their sow herd 10.7% over the past year, but pork output during Q3 was still up from a year ago. Downward pressure on pork prices persisted. Producer prices for hogs were down nearly 20% from a year ago. China's inventory of productive sows was 36.02 million head at the end of Q3 2026, down 10.7% from a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics . This is 4% below the agriculture ministry's target of 37.5 million. The sow herd is 10 million head smaller than its peak in 2021, and it has not been this small since 2020 during the recovery from the African swine fever epidemic. The overall swine inventory was down 2.6% from a year ago, reaching 425.33 million at the end of Q3. China National Bureau of Statistics The reduction in sows has not yet led to a reduction in China's pork output. Calculations using the Bureau's data releases show that pork output has exceeded year-earlier output in each of the first three quar...