How European pig farmers could adjust to the Russian import embargo

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.