said at the Banff Pork Seminar that China is the top influencer in agricultural markets around the world.  
Everything has changed in the last five years. Speaking from charts and many travels, global corn, wheat, beef, pork, and chicken China dominates the purchases in those commodities.  
In the last three years, corn in China went from the number eight importer to the number one. In wheat from the seventh importer in the world to number two. China became the largest beef importer globally by a factor of two over the last ten years. Pork, of course, with their African Swine Fever losses, used to import a million tonnes of pork. Now they import 4 to 5 million tonnes of pork: chicken, same story. So they went from the bottom of the pack to number two in the world.  
“With all of these commodities, China is the biggest or at least in the top three biggest buyers of every major commodity. People in agriculture anticipated this happening for years – and it happened in only three years.” 
Travelling to China for the past 20 years and 40 years plus, farmers said if China would only buy a little more of this or that, sales would skyrocket.  
“My business partner, he’s from your generation and his attitude China’s the market of the future, and it always will be. It’s the moving goal post. We always think, boy, China’s going to be so big. It never happened. What I’m telling you, it just happened.” 
All farmers want more markets and rising demand. China creates new demand. But unfortunately, China is an unreliable trading partner. They often impose their self-serving political directives at the peril of global suppliers.   
“Consider the way they book soybean cargoes, then cancel and rebook if prices rise. Then, they delist foreign meat plants over ‘COVID’ on the boxes or ‘illegal residues.’ Some plants remain delisted for years. Now as China tops many lists as a larger global buyer, that creates more volatility in these commodity markets as farmers are more affected by an unreliable buyer.” 
Stuart said a buyer that buys that BIG, until they see a threat or opportunity and then creates barriers. So, the world allows China to avoid rules that other countries keep. 
Before ASF decimated the Chinese hog herd, they owned and consumed half the pigs in the world.   
The ASF virus is highly fatal, hardy, hard to kill, especially without a vaccine. The good news is it’s not airborne like the PRRS virus or PEDv. It must be nose to nose, manure, blood, bodily fluid.  
“If you know China and have seen the swine sector, you knew that in 2018 when China said, hey, we found one case, you knew it was going to decimate their industry.” 
They had over 40 million backyard farmers and probably still have close to that today. Those backyard farmers share trucks, feed mills, everything. This ASF virus would gut the world’s largest swineherd. 
Stuart travelled to China three times from 2018 through 2019, talking to the government, producers, industry, the company’s pharma, everybody possible and remembers being there in May 2019 and the world didn’t know. The Chinese government kept saying it was not a big deal. The USDA Beijing office had just put out a report and said the herd would be five per cent smaller this year.  
“I came from a conference in China where the China Swine Association said they think 30 per cent of the herd is already gone. It will be way bigger than five per cent, and it may well kill half the herd. In the end, nobody knows how many hogs are in China.” 
He guessed that China culled 65 per cent of that swineherd during 2019. As a result, their prices went up two to three hundred percent for the next 16 months, which weighed heavy on global markets. 
The Chinese people did not worry about eating that pork because ASF doesn’t affect the meat but only the pig’s health.  
“Maybe it would be a consumer issue here in the US or Canada but not there. A few people said oh, we’re eating less pork. He added, but when the price is up 300 per cent, everyone’s eating less pork.” 
However, the virus is hardy, lasts up to ten years in frozen pork and is hard to kill. A person could freeze pork in China in 2020, thaw it out in 2022, eat it, throw the scraps outside, the pigs eat the scraps and they’re infected. The original virus is around 95 per cent fatal, kills everything. Here’s the kicker. There’s no vaccine. Even today, there is still no vaccine. The Chinese claim they have vaccines but there’s no proven vaccine on earth, at least not yet. •
— By Harry Siemens