ASF legacy: Shrunken pork supply at end-’19

THE world will end 2019 with a smaller pork supply as China, the biggest consumer of pork, continues to grapple with the fatal African swine fever (ASF) while the disease spreads to meatloving Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.

In its biannual “Food Outlook” report, the FAO forecast that global pork output this year would settle at 110.5 million metric tons (MMT), 8.5-percent lower than last year’s 120.7 MMT.

The sheer decline in global pork output will pull down world total meat output for the first time in two decades to 335.2 MMT this year. The figure is a percent lower than last year’s estimated 338.6 MMT total global meat output.

“This marks a departure from the stable growth trend recorded over the past two decades and indicates a sharper fall than anticipated in May, principally due to a deeper-than-earlier-expected impact of African swine fever in China and its spread to several East Asian countries,” the FAO said in the report which was published recently.

The FAO said China’s meat output is forecast to fall by 8-percent year-on-year with its pork production alone declining by at least 20 percent this year.

With the decline in China’s meat output, the world’s biggest pork producer, global trade in meat and meat products is projected to rise by 6.7 percent to 36 MMT this year from last year’s 33.8 MMT, according to FAO estimates.

FAO said meat trade this year is“principally driven by increased imports by China due to domestic tightness caused by ASF-related

production losses.” The FAO projected that global per-capita meat consumption this year would fall by 2.1 percent to 43.3 kilograms from 44.2 kilograms last year.

Despite the presence of ASF, the Philippines’s total meat output this year is projected to rise by 4 percent to 3.72 MMT from 3.576 MMT last year, according to FAO.

Philippine pork output is estimated to reach 1.963 MMT, which is 4.24 percent more than the 1.883 MMT it produced in 2018, FAO data showed. Jasper Emmanuel Y. Arcalas