Dr. John Carr, a world-renowned livestock consultant, veterinarian, and college lecturer in Australia said in an interview recently price of pork is skyrocketing in China, and the planet, not only China could have a ten per cent deficit in meat next year.
“And what is China doing for pork, it is going up in price because 80 per cent of the meat protein comes from pork,” said Dr. Carr. “But interestingly at the airports when I was in Shanghai I think, the airport restaurant had a brand new menu – No pork dishes, duck, chicken, beef, and fish.”
It wasn’t so much because they couldn’t get pork, but the price is too high to sell to the customer. “Oh, the price would be starting to get to the point where the customers might complain,” said Carr. “You want to keep the price within a limit, but the price of pork in China is 50 per cent more now than it was, but it’ll double, triple, quadruple. But I’m convinced the pork price will get to be as expensive as beef. Only those people who can afford to eat beef in China do so, but most up until this point relied on pork for their protein.”
Dr. Carr, who consults for some of the larger farms in China said, “The reality of the current situation is if you take African Swine Fever at face value, and we end up with a mortality rate of 50 per cent it’s halfway between 20 and 80 you know. If we’re going to do that, we must increase the number of cows on this planet by 40 per cent.”
Well, that isn’t going to happen; they all produce too much methane. Or we’ve got to produce 25 per cent more chicken and China already owns half of the chickens in the world.
That’s where Carr backs up his original statement the world will be short of meat protein.
“I think next year the planet is going to be facing a 10 per cent shortage of meat protein,” he said. “This is not about China; this is about the food fight. This is about the planet. I mean, something like one in five pigs on the planet now has African Swine Fever or is directly affected by the dreaded disease.”
Carr said it isn’t so much that China is losing 50 per cent of their pigs at the moment because they are eating them.
“So I know that your pigs aren’t looking very well, so I’m selling mine. And so when people say, oh, only 10 per cent died of African Swine Fever, maybe that’s true, but 30 per cent of the pigs of that area were removed because people panicked,” he said. “They went through to the processing plant before they died at home. I mean, it’s what I would do, if I hear that your pigs aren’t doing well, you live three doors down, I will not take the risk, so off they go. If they’re ready off they go, even if I eat them myself, they still no longer exist on this planet.”
Carr said the big issue with African Swine Fever, unlike almost all the other conditions the pig industry has ever dealt with, mom, dad, babies all die. In the PED virus and the outbreak’s dreadful, absolutely terrible and the vets are doing the best they can under current regulations available in Canada but PED only kills everything below ten days of age.
“Mum comes back into heat, and she cycles again, gets pregnant. Yeah. More babies,” he said. “Mom and dad haven’t died. It’s a bloody disaster. But I pick myself up, give myself a shake, and it’s an economic problem as much as it is everything else.”
Carr has pig farms in Vietnam African Swine Flu positive and the pigs are dying. They don’t want to lose their babies or lose the farm.
“And what you’ve got is, if I depopulate the farm and started up again, where am I going to get the stock from,” he said.
In China where the farms he consults for the pigs are still negative and with many of the other farms losing all their breeding stock, for them, it is more and more desperate to keep negative.
“I mean we’re sold out until sometime next year. All the girls that I can produce, I’ve had buyers,” said Carr. “Effectively, the big farms are trying to restock and get themselves sorted out. Some of the bigger farms have lost all their pigs and need to find future breeding stock. So we have, thank God, an ASF negative status and we keep testing and everything else. If people have ASF negative pigs to buy from, so then when they put all their efforts into bio-security and everything else, it makes some sense.” •
— By Harry Siemens