A troubled river, fishermen gain. Or from the Russian ranchers, if the case may be. With relations between Beijing and the European Union (EU) strained as a result of tariff policy, Moscow has seen its great opportunity to gain a foothold in a particularly juicy market: that of Chinese demand for exported pork. He doesn’t lack muscle. And after returning this year to the Chinese butcher shops, from which they had been separated for almost a decade and a half due to Beijing’s health restrictions, in the Russian sector there are those who already aspire to keep the EU quota.
The big question is: What can we expect from now on?
To start, some figures. China is the world’s largest pork producer. But also a huge, gigantic market that imports hundreds of thousands of tons of pork cuts worth billions of dollars every year. More specifically, about 3.5 billion, according to data from World’s Top Export, although there are those who speak of considerably higher figures if the entire market is taken into account, including viscera. Among these figures, the European Union and especially Spain have an important weight.
Although meat from many other countries arrives at Chinese stores, including Brazil, Canada and the US, the EU has managed to open a more than respectable gap in the flow of Chinese imports. Reuters estimates its weight at 51% (it once exceeded 60%), with contributions from the Netherlands, Denmark, France and especially Spain. For reference, a year ago Icex boasted that in 2020 Spain had become the main exporter to China, with 24% of the meat flow. In 2023, that position would have been occupied by Brazil, with 26%, but Spain continued to remain in second place.
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script twist. Despite these data and the overwhelming weight that pork has among Spanish agri-food exports to China (around 63%), the future of this trade flow has been filled with dark clouds over recent months. And for a reason that apparently has little or nothing to do with pig farming: electric vehicles.
The controversy has been going on for months and at WorldOfSoftware we have told you about it in detail, but its summary is simple: after seeing how Brussels raised tariffs on the arrival of electric cars “made in China”, Beijing reacted by targeting the European pork sector, announcing an investigation antidumping focused on pork imports from the EU. Proof of the “panic” that this blow generated among Spanish livestock farmers is that the Government and producers made a move almost immediately, traveling in person to China in an attempt to protect a market that in 2023 reached a value of more than 1.2 billion.
Russia regains ground. The Chinese pork sector does not only leave bad news. At least for Russia, which at the beginning of the year managed to gain a foothold in the Asian market by sending a modest consignment of pork to China. It may not seem like a big deal, but it was an important milestone for several reasons. The main thing is that they were the first pork exports that Moscow brought to the Asian giant in almost a decade and a half, since Beijing had applied restrictions in 2008 due to African swine fever.
The second reason is that this shipment has seemed to mark the starting signal for the expansion of Russian pork into the Chinese market. In June it had already quadrupled its supply, boosting both shipments of frozen meat and by-products. From Moscow, in fact, China is expected to expand the list of Russian suppliers authorized to operate in its national market (now there are only three), which according to its calculations would boost its global flow of meat exports by several tens of thousands of tons. of pork by 2025.
60,000 tons (or more). “If the new Russian producers do not gain access in 2205, we predict that exports to China will amount to 60,000-70,000 tons. But if another five or six companies are certified early next year, an increase in volume can be expected to 100,000 tons,” recently assessed the general director of the National Union of Pork Producers, Yuri Kovalev, in statements reported by Interfax. In fact, the manager remembers that in July Russia already entered the TOP 5 of China’s suppliers.
Objective: grow in quota. It is not the only clue that demonstrates the interest that Russia has in the Asian market and, above all, the extent to which it hopes or trusts in taking advantage of the trade tensions that have arisen between China and one of its main suppliers, the EU. In February Reuters explained that the Russian National Union of Pig Breeders aspired to capture 5% of the Chinese import market. In August the goal was already 10%. And in December Kovalev highlighted that, after having shipped almost 38,000 in less than a year, China has become “one of the three main buyers of Russian pork” in 2024.
Don’t say tension, say opportunity. The Russian attempt to gain market share in China, even at the expense of other suppliers, is no secret. Yuri Kovalyov, representative of the pork sector, openly acknowledged this to Reuters a few months ago: “For us these trade tensions represent an opportunity to show our competitiveness in the Chinese market,” he explained due to the tension in Beijing-Brussels relations due to the tariffs on electric cars.
Dmitri Reva, an expert in the Russian consumer market, expressed himself even more clearly during an interview with the Chinese media Guancha. “If necessary we could fully satisfy the demand for pork imported from Europe. In three years we could supply a million tons or more of pork per year,” reflected the researcher: “We are fully capable of replacing Spanish exports of 600,000 tons of pork to China. However, at present China may not be very interested in that option.”
What is Russia’s capacity? According to data from the United States Department of Agriculture, throughout the 2023/2024 period, Russia stood out as one of the main pork producers on the planet. Its production share was still far from that of the entire EU, the US, Brazil and of course China itself, but it already represented 3%, with a production considerably higher than that of Vietnam, Canada or Mexico. Your sector seems to be gaining muscle, too. Compared to the 4.9 million tons recorded in 2023, according to Reuters, this year production is expected to skyrocket to reach 5.2 million.
Imágenes | K-State Research and Extension (Flickr)
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