Pig farmers are pleased about demand boom from China

02-Apr-2019 - Germany

The consumption of pork meat and the number of slaughters in Germany have been falling for years - in this situation, a recent boom in demand from China has provided a boost to slaughter prices. Due to the trade war between Beijing and Washington as well as the African swine fever in China, the demand for European pork in the Middle Kingdom has risen sharply over the past three weeks, said Matthias Quaing, market expert for the German Pig Farmers' Interest Group (ISN), in Damme. "The slaughter price has risen by 20 cents in the past two weeks, an average of almost 20 euros per pig - we haven't seen such an increase for a long time."

The other side of the coin is that many medium-sized meat processors can no longer refinance the increased purchase prices. The sausage producers set the prices with the food retail trade in longer-term contracts. In the end, the bill only works if the trade passes the rising prices on to the consumers - otherwise there might be existential difficulties for one or the other sausage manufacturer, Quaing said.

The ISN's annual survey of German slaughterhouses also shows that the pork market is shrinking, Quaing stressed. The three largest German pig slaughterhouses are therefore Tönnies, the Dutch company Vion and the Münster cooperative Westfleisch. The East Westphalian industry leader Tönnies had announced a 3.6 percent drop in sales to 6.65 billion euros for 2018 in mid-March./eks/DP/zb (dpa)

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

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