A ghost haunts the markets throughout Spain and no, it is not a metaphor: MercoLleida, the main European pork market, is already registering drops of between 7 and 17% in the price of pork. It is the biggest disaster in 30 years.
And the bad thing for the industry is that this is just the beginning.
What is happening? We could say that the most obvious thing is that there are at least 50 wild boars killed in the Collserola mountain range. That is, without a doubt, an indicator of the intensity of the problem. African swine fever, despite not affecting humans, has mortality and morbidity levels close to 100%: “can kill all the pigs on a farm after a few days of fever, coughing and bleeding.”
But, in reality, that does not explain the price drop.
And then? The price of pork in Spain (and, by extension, in Europe) has collapsed due to something else: fear. Swine fever is a disease so terrible, so resistant and so difficult to eradicate that “the appearance of a single case of plague causes preventive blocking of pork exports”.
There are more than 20 countries that, to begin with, they do not accept regionalization and, therefore, the veto of Spanish pork exports is en bloc and immediate. Among them are Japan or Mexico. And the truth is that the situation could be much worse if Spain and China they would not have signed the regionalization agreement just a few weeks ago.
That’s the reason for the price drop: suddenly, there’s a lot of leftover pork.
Europe’s farm. After all, even with ‘regionalization’ underway (the international blockade of Catalan pork, but not the rest) the tons of meat that have to find a buyer are enormous. With more than 8 million animals and nearly 3.2 billion euros in annual meat exports, Catalan farms They represent 52% of Spanish international sales. How is the price not going to collapse?
And the worst, as I say, begins now. Not only because no one knows if the efforts to contain the epidemic they will be successfulbut because the impact on the industry can be devastating. It is enough to remember that Germany was the European country that produced the most pork until in 2020 an infected wild boar crossed the border with Poland and unleashed a huge national crisis that dismantled the sector.
That is to say, the Spanish pig is in a critical situation; but at the consumption level it has no problem. First, because the plague does not affect humans; and second (and more important) because no Spanish farm has been affected because of the virus. And they are being reviewed one by one.
A trompe l’oeil In the short term this effectively means lower prices than usual. And, in a context of general rise (with chicken in full escalation), it is good news for consumers.
What we don’t know is what impact it will have in the medium and long term: if it is a temporary blip, the industry will have some margin. If not, we cannot rule out that prices will skyrocket in the future. The problem is that, as the days go by, the situation looks worse and worse.
Image | Kwon Junho | Mossos
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