I thought this was an interesting piece of information, along with a bit about how the provincial government subsidizes these industries.
>For decades, protein in China meant pork. Pigs fed the workers who built the cities and staffed the factories that powered the country's economic boom. China became home to half the world’s hogs, whose appetite for grain, especially soybeans, redrew trade flows from the US Midwest to Brazil.
>But that era is over. When Reuters visited Huang in August, she was tossing slop to her last 10 hogs in a cobweb-covered barn. Some $75,000 in debt, she planned to slaughter them by autumn.
>“I have been raising pigs for over two decades, but it has never been as hard as the last two years,” Huang, 57, said. “Pig prices are so low. People in the cities just stopped eating pork.”
usernomdeguerre•57m ago
>For decades, protein in China meant pork. Pigs fed the workers who built the cities and staffed the factories that powered the country's economic boom. China became home to half the world’s hogs, whose appetite for grain, especially soybeans, redrew trade flows from the US Midwest to Brazil.
>But that era is over. When Reuters visited Huang in August, she was tossing slop to her last 10 hogs in a cobweb-covered barn. Some $75,000 in debt, she planned to slaughter them by autumn.
>“I have been raising pigs for over two decades, but it has never been as hard as the last two years,” Huang, 57, said. “Pig prices are so low. People in the cities just stopped eating pork.”