American Thinker:
China’s food supply is being imperiled as new reports warn that up to 50 percent of China’s 440 million pigs are now at risk from African Swine Fever infection.
The South China Morning Post reported that Chairman Chan Kin Yip of the Federation of Hong Kong Agricultural Associations claimed that Chinese mainland pig farmers told him African Swine Fever has spread to 30 percent of mainland pigs, while another Hong Kong pig farmer based in China told Yip the exposure rate is as high as 50 percent.
With $23.8 billion of agricultural imports from the U.S. in 2017, retaliatory tariffs directly aimed at President Trump’s rural voter base were expected to be China’s hammer to bludgeon the U.S. into abandoning its trade war. Accounting for 17 percent of U.S. agricultural exports, Chinese customers were number one in soybeans, number two in pork and hay, number three in dairy and poultry, number four in beef, and number five in wheat.
First detected in August 2018, the raging pandemic of highly communicable African Swine Fever has spread to every mainland province and Hong Kong. The virus causes blackened lesions, diarrhea, abortion, respiratory illness, and then death in seven to ten days.
With production declines of 35 percent and prices spiking 40 percent, the disease is wreaking havoc on the China’s $128-billion-a-year pork industry. Although Beijing has encouraged the provinces to provide financial support to large-scale pig farms, the loss of sales and cost to cull up to 220 million infected pigs is a huge burden on the people.
The African Swine Fever has jumped the Chinese border to over 52 cities in Vietnam, leading to the culling of more than 2 million pigs. With the fear of the disease growing, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc instructed various ministries to urge more pig culling.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, partnering with the Department of Agriculture, confiscated 1 million pounds of Chinese pork smuggled into a port in New Jersey in March. Meat was mislabeled and hidden “among other products such as ramen noodles and tide detergent pods” in 50 shipping containers, according to the Feed Navigator.
Nothin but good things from Africa.
izlamo delenda est …
Oink, Oink! Just another good reason to never ever eat any and all food products from China.
C’mon….what’s wrong with a slightly infected pig?
They eat chicken feet already…think of where those chickens walked.
https://geoffbilbrough.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/chicken_feet.jpg
.
http://theradishpatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/IMG_1263.jpg
.
And people think we can’t win a trade war with them.
What about all the footless chickens??
I don’t know who buys chicken feet but I do see them at Winco in one of the meat freezers. They look gross to me and they’re very cheap, I think that I’d rather eat pickled pigs feet although not Chinese ones. I never ate pickled pigs feet although one of my friends dad of German heritage tried to get me to eat them once. The pickled herring was bad enough.
Easy peasy!
Make Islam the State Religion and problem solved.
Hahahaha! Hey Syngenta got a comment?
I had heard that nearly all pandemics originate in the far east. It’s like a bomb waiting to go of when it crosses species. We’re overdue!
…all the years I washed dishes in a Chinese Restaurant, even on nights when they had actual Chinese dishes for family and freinds from the old country on special holidays when they shut the restaurant down to gweilos, I never saw them eat dog, cat, or chicken feet per se, but I did see them bleed a chicken right on the cook line into a bowl to make some kind of sauce that wasn’t for hahengui consumption.
Other than that, the worst thing I ever saw was when I came in one night and found a live squid happily swimming in the first hole of my three-hole sink, to keep it fresh for a festival feast later.
Of course, it was a FORMOSAN restaurant so it was NATIONALIST Chinese ex-pats, and they tended to NOT go in for the things their mainland Communist cousins did.
…now, there was a restaurant I knew of because of people I knew that worked there that WAS mainlanders, and they were also Buddhists, and came here because they fled the Communists. One of the quirks was that they had various sculptures of Buddha on deeper shelves in various places around the restaurant, and the shelves were deep because they put bowls of actual food in front of them. Big as he was, Buddha apparently wasn’t very hungry, so the roaches would help him out a bit with finishing his meal, which made for some interesting customer reactions when they scuttled up and down the walls at dinner time. This was also complicated by the fact that they had a bar downstairs that was a completely separate, independently owned business, and the owners HATED each other, and so wouldn’t agree to ANYTHING, not even a bug-bombing schedule. So, the restaurant would bug bomb and the roaches would run down to the bar, then the bar would bug bomb another day and the roaches would run back to the restaurant. This made for optimal roach raising conditions, and this had some interesting consequences. One was that the beer cooler failed one day, and a fellow came to fix it, only to find that there were SO many roaches in the MOTOR for the compressor that they JAMMED it. It seems that roaches like warmth, and crawled into the non-wash down motor housing as a group when it was idle, only to become a surprised, crunchy roach paste when it tried to start.
That was the last day that PARTICULAR maintenance company did a service call at that restaurant.
They got shut down not long after that, as did the bar, and the City tore the building down completely, it was that bad.
…although I’ve wandered a bit off topic, in that the mainlanders did things like “thousand year old eggs” that kind of LOOKED and SMELLED like MONTH old, refrigerated eggs, and on festival days would dismantle a duck, cook the meat into sort of a spam consistency, knead it BACK into the shape of the duck, then stick the unprocessed duck head and feet back onto the pressed duck, and serve with it’s decaying, bleary eyes looking right at you above its open beak and lolling tongue.
I didn’t work at THAT one so I don’t know about the puppies and kitties, but they were NOT far from a veterinary hospital, so maybe…
You kind of have to take a different approach when you have to feed billions.
…anyway, Chinese restaurants regardless of pedigree do not exist for the food so much as they do as immigration conduits. They hire locals like myself for menial jobs like dishwashing and waitressing, but the people who run the joint, cashiers, and cooks are all friends and family that are doing time in the restaurant so they can get a green card.
They work hard, though, and did it all legally, and provided Americans like myself jobs along the way. Doesn’t seem to be the case for some OTHER immigrant groups I could name, but that’s a different subject for another day…
Gee, what could replace such a food stuff that has protein, minerals, vitamins and general good sustenance? Why, I know, soy beans have that and more. Looks like China might be in need of some these soon. Now where could you get a good supply of such a wonderful food, hmmmmm?
What?
The pigs sneeze and have shivers?
Who cares? Cook em longer – I like ham a tad charred, anyway.
(and, obviously, I know NOTHING about sick pigs, &c.)
But – the heathen Chinee gonna do what the heathen Chinee gonna do.
izlamo delenda est …
Didn’t congress pass a law that says you no longer have to name the country of origin on food stuffs entering our country?
@Geoff: pickled herring? Wonderful stuff. You’re either too Norwegian – or not enough!
More on topic: I think good pork has more B-vitamins than beef, or something. Pork makes me feel better these days than beef. And it used to be the other way around.
@Doc: “Didn’t congress pass a law that …”
yup
“SUMMARY: This final rule amends the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) regulations to remove muscle cut beef and pork, and ground beef and pork from mandatory COOL requirements. The COOL regulations are issued pursuant to the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 (Act).”
https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/COOL%20final%20rule%20federal%20register%20version.pdf
related:
https://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/usda-is-going-to-allow-china-to-process-chickens-for-u-s-consumption/
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2013/05/chinese-firm-to-buy-smithfield-foods-americas-largest-pork-producer/ (they did)
What???……they run outa cats?
When I was in China I ordered what I
thought was noodles. I was served
noodle soup with Chicken feet, toenails and all swimming in the broth. We paid and left in a hurry! I lived on peanuts the rest of the visit.
You put your health at risk by eating a Chinese owned and operated at a Chinese Buffet. Several of them have closed in Seattle because of a mounting violations for healh violations. When we see a sudden drop of the homeless, it simply means they have sued up all the cats.
America’s pigs (progs) thrive.
Maybe we can sell them to china.
Anonymous JUNE 8, 2019 AT 12:54 PM
“America’s pigs (progs) thrive.
Maybe we can sell them to china.”
…THOSE things would probably taste like bitterness and bile, with notes of old regrets and flashes of raw butthurt; and so laden with drugs that they’re unfit for consumption by even the doughiest of cannibals.
…On the other hand, if they’re like Hillary, they’re ALREADY pickled, so you save money prepping them for transport…
Fake, but inaccurate.
(Though it feelz right.)
(And, not MJA’s headline. So no bad feelz, there.)
This (along with bird plagues) is the Middle Kingdom’s avocado apocalypse.
China can feed itself. With what it grows. If the Silicon Valley slaves go back to rice and… whatever they used to use for “beans”.
Of course, no Mickey Xi’s will lead to social unrest. But with the trade slow down, it’s about time for another “nothing ever happened” here square “not” incident, anyway.
I’m pretty sure the Chinese already own most of the major pork processing capacity in the US. Look for prices to skyrocket here as they export more pork home.
Not GOOD, not good at all. What happens when a countries food supply runs out??
They invade another country to get the food they need.
And when THAT countries leaders have to feed a billion people??
We had better keep an eye open on this one.