August 9, 2007

 

Blue ear disease seen to lessen China's soy imports this year

 

 

China is seen to import fewer cargoes of soybeans this year than initially projected amid industry reports that as many as 50 million pigs have died from blue-ear disease, according to American Soybean Association (ASA) on Wednesday (August 8).

 

Phillip Laney, China country director for ASA, said they forecast China will import 29 million tonnes of soybeans in calendar 2007, down from an early estimate of 31 million tonnes.

 

Laney said the decline doesn't matter much but the death loss from blue ear disease has seriously impacted backyard producers.

 

Backyard producers -- those who market fewer than 50 head a year -- generally feed little soymeal to their pigs.

 

More than half of all pork production in China takes place on backyard farms. Many of the small farms hit by the disease have stopped raising swine, said Xiaoping Zhang, deputy director for the American Soybean Association's Beijing office.

 

China's hog production, thus, rely in the hands of larger operations, which usually have more stringent animal husbandry procedures that have limited the spread of the disease.

 

The pigs have died from a variation of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome virus -- also known as blue-ear disease -- in an outbreak that began in May last year.

 

The Ministry of Agriculture said the disease has infected 165,144 pigs in 25 provinces in China this year, as of July 22. The government has said 1 million pigs died in 2006.

 

Industry reports have said that 50 million hogs have died since the outbreak started in mid-2006, Zhang said.

 

China is the world's largest pork producer, producing five times more than the United States, the second-largest producer.

 

Chinese pork prices have increased to their highest levels in a decade due to price slump and disease outbreaks which discouraged farmers to breed.

 

The smaller hog herd has hurt demand for soymeal and prompted some processing plants to cancel soybean shipments.

 

East Ocean Oils & Grains Industries Co. -- a joint venture of US-based Archer Daniels Midland, Singapore-trading firm Wilmar Holdings and state owned China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs (COFCO)-- has cancelled four cargoes of South American soybeans, Zhang said, with talk that other processors may also cancel shipments this summer.

 

China has bought few old-crop soybeans from the United States recently but total export sales in the marketing year that started Sept. 1 have reached 11.3 million tonnes, up from 9.8 million tonnes at this time last year.