Just recently Russia extended the import ban of certain food products from the EU to the end of 2017. Since 2014 – the first year of the Russian embargo – the EU agri-food sector has undergone major changes regarding its main export destinations and markets. The profound transformation of the pig meat market is a result of this process.
Over the years 2011 – 2013 Russia had a proportion of more than 30% of EU pig meat destinations to Non-EU countries. After the introduction of the ban, EU pork exports to Russia plummeted by more than 90%; but the decline of the EU overall pork exports decreased by just 5% in 2014. This indicates that new markets were opened by the EU since the production level didn´t change significantly.
Obviously the soaring demand for pig meat in Asia helped the EU pork exporters to compensate the drop in exports to Russia, as figure 1 shows. In 2014 China imported more than 500,000 tonnes of pig meat, 75% of these imports sourced from the EU. This implies for European pig farmers China being their main export destination absorbing more than a third of all EU pig meat exports.
The dependency of the Asian export markets has to be watched carefully since China´s pork production is growing constantly. Today China is by far the world largest pig meat producer, the level of self-sufficiency has reached nearly 100%. But given the steady increase in Chinese demand for pig meat and some structural difficulties of pig meat production in China, especially in the field of pollution prevention, experts don´t expect China to become a pork exporting country in the near future.