China is expected to import fewer cargoes of soyabeans this year than initially projected amid industry reports that as many as 50 million pigs have died from blue-ear disease, Phillip Laney, China country director for the American Soyabean Association, said on Wednesday.
The association forecasts China will import 29 million tonnes of soyabeans in calendar 2007, down from an early estimate of 31 million tonnes. "It really hasn't hurt meal demand and soyabean imports the way one would have suspected it would," Laney said at the US Soya Industry Strategic Planning Conference in Chicago. "The death loss has most seriously impacted the backyard producer." Backyard producers - those who market fewer than 50 head a year - generally feed little soyameal 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 Soyabean Association's Beijing office.
"The small farmer doesn't want to be in the business any more," he said. "They just quit. They replaced the hogs once, twice and gave up." That trend is putting more of China's hog production 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.