Livestock Ministry of Agriculture Data Shows Hog Recovery on Track According to the latest market surveys from China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA), through this past June the country’s sow and live hog inventories are recovering at a steady pace. At the halfway point of 2020, the estimated nationwide sow inventory has recovered to 36.3 million head, while live pig output has climbed to 251 million head. With wholesale and retail prices remaining at historically high levels, the central government has continued to auction off frozen pork from its strategic reserves. In the last two weeks of July, China’s Merchandise Reserve Management Center has held two auctions. At the 23 July auction, a total...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.