USDA new loan effort may ease pain of pork producers

 

 

The USDA's latest effort to use its loan programme to help struggling livestock producers may provide significant help to troubled pork producers, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council said Monday (Aug 10).

 

The industry is in desperate need of aid and government financing is likely to help, spokesman Dave Warner said.

 

"Producers have been losing money for so long that a lot of them have burned through the equity they built up," Warner said. "Now we're at 22 months of losses and lenders are saying no more - no more credits."

 

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has directed the Farm Service Agency to increase its efforts "to provide loan assistance to livestock producers," the USDA said in a statement released Monday.

 

"The Obama Administration is committed to doing everything it can to help families and businesses in agriculture to get through these tough economic times," Vilsack said.

 

And the pork industry is having an especially tough time, Warner said. Prices have been too low for producers to profit for nearly a year and are not expected to rise anytime in the near future.

 

Input costs continue to rise for the industry, he said, "but the real problem is there's just too much pork out there."

 

Producers slaughtered about 115 million pigs in 2008 and that represents a continuous increase from 2007 and 2006, Warner said.

 

The NPCC also commended the governors from the country's top pork producing states for urging President Obama to take immediate action to help US pork producers tide through a nearly two-year-old economic crisis.

 

In a letter sent to the president, the governors of Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin asked the administration to support at least an additional US$50 million of pork purchases for government feeding programmes; remove a spending cap on USDA's food-assistance programme so that additional purchases of surplus agriculture products, including pork, can be made; urge China to quickly lift a ban on US pork that was put in place because of the AH1N1 flu outbreak and to eliminate other barriers to US pork exports.