
One-quarter of the world’s pigs died in a year due to swine fever in China - vo2maxer
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/opinion/china-swine-fever.html
======
xwowsersx
Funny to see this finally making mainstream news and the front page of HN. I
worked as a research analyst at a long/short equities fund and one of the
biggest bets we placed was based on ASF. The sell side was completely
complacent about this, but we were tracking the disease closely and the math
was undeniable - this was going to be a major, major disruption in global
protein markets.

Bullets of the thesis were:

\- African Swine Fever in China is putting half the global supply of hogs at
risk.

\- It will take years for China to get a handle on the disease.

\- This will cause prices of pork in China to rise. China will have to import
pork to fill the hole in order to avoid a political crisis.

\- As a result, global proteins will enter a multi-year up-cycle. All proteins
(beef, chicken, pork) will benefit.

This structural thesis could be played many, many ways.

~~~
dman
Any examples of how a retail investor would play this?

~~~
davidw
Buy an index fund.

Do you think you can compete with that big investment outfit that has people
working on this stuff full time?

~~~
bluGill
Sure I can compete. I don't have so much money under my control that my act of
buying/selling changes the market. Thus I can afford to make trades that are
worth a lot of money on my scale, but not worth it for the big guys because
compared to the total amount they must work with means they don't have the
time.

Note I said can. Reading the 10k and 8q and other such forms to find those
opportunities is boring. I get paid very well to write software instead and
just let an index fund grow my money. I can't live off my investments yet, but
when they grow enough I'll be able to [substitute any of a number of hobbies I
might get interested in], and it won't be a full time job moving money around.

~~~
davidw
"not worth it for the big guys"

Sounds like a legit strategy, but it also sounds like part of it is actively
_not competing_ with them.

~~~
nothrabannosir
If that's how you define it, then it was never the question to begin with.
Someone just asked how to move on this info, which, we now all agree, is
possible. Nobody said anything about competing until it was brought up as a
glib dismissal of the original question. Which, we now agree, wasn't
warranted.

~~~
davidw
From the OP "Buy TSN, SAFM, HRL... _but it 's probably too late_ at this
point. We were placing bets on this 18 months ago."

Emphasis mine.

~~~
nothrabannosir
I'm confused. Are you saying placing small bets that aren't worth it for big
management firms is a "legit strategy" to perform better on the scale of a
retail investor, or not? I'm getting mixed messages.

~~~
davidw
There are two conversations here:

* Pigs and how to make a buck because of all the ones dying in China. I'm not seeing any good suggestions about how to profit from that for small investors.

* bluGill's suggestion that they can compete with big actors by not competing with them, by looking at deals that are too small for the big fish to be interested in.

The latter seemed an 'in general' strategy and not related to the specific
situation with the pork and broader meat industries.

------
duelingjello
Meat ag is incredibly dangerous and pollution-causing.

1\. Pandemic evolution by cramming zillions of animals in unsanitary
conditions, with humans interspersed attempting to clear out rivers of poop
and pee.

2\. Antibiotic resistance by overusing antibiotics to promote growth while
compelling accelerated evolution of microbes that can’t be treated with as
many classes of antibiotics.

3\. Inefficient allocation of input and supporting resources: diesel fuel,
water, fertilizer, phosphorous and crops.

4\. Pollution of air, water and soil... pig farms especially necessitate lakes
of shit that are sprayed into the air, polluting large areas of air, waiter
and land. Agriculture runoff as well.

5\. Climate change. Net CO2 output of meat ag is nearly that of Portland
cement (clinker) production.

....

99\. Animal cruelty... which doesn’t persuade many people because self-
interested cognitive dissonance overcomes most people’s limits of self-control
and rational thought. (Upton Sinclair-like effect.)

~~~
geddy
This is exactly the point I tried to make below when people kept claiming that
E. coli was a plant problem and not a plant problem. But as you mentioned,
it's far more convenient to talk about the dreaded potato blight and ignore
the fact that animal agriculture is the biggest contributor to species
extinction (through clearing of land for growing of crops to feed back to
animals).

------
floatingatoll
Two other relevant HN discussions in the past week:

 _Chinese criminal gangs spreading African swine fever to force farmers to
sell pigs_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891495)

 _China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968)

------
latchkey
This isn't just China, it is the whole region.

I've lived in Vietnam for 4 years now and have traveled extensively by
motorbike over the entire country. On all of the roads, there is various
livestock roaming freely. Goats, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, buffalo, etc...
they are either just on the street or in pens in peoples literal shacks by the
side of the road.

When driving from south to north (towards China), at some point, you stop
seeing pigs entirely. There are checkpoints every few km where you are
required to drive through either a wet hole in the ground or over a wet burlap
sack. At some places, they spray your tires. There are signs in the villages
telling people to be careful.

Needless to say, for this reason and others, I've stopped eating meat in
Vietnam unless I know it is imported from an expat owned restaurant. Even
then, I've dialed back my meat consumption quite a bit. Eating street food has
entirely lost its appeal.

~~~
tillcarlos
Exactly. You have no insights in where the meat comes from and how long it was
cooled before preparation etc.

Fortunately, here in Vietnam the vegetarian options are plenty and also really
good.

~~~
latchkey
Hey Till, nice to see you here on hn! =)

------
mikedilger
One-quarter doesn't sound like much to me as a sheep farmer. Our herds double-
to-triple every year, and then get cut way back again as we turn the lambs
into meat. Pigs have even more offspring: 5-6 piglets per litter, 1.5 litters
per year, and can have their first litter at 8 months. "One-quarter of the
pigs" should be replacable in less than a year, a minor temporary supply
shortage for the meat market.

EDIT: I don't disupte any of the facts of the article, and my use of the world
"minor" is from the presumption that people might infer that this is a long-
term problem, rather than an acute and quickly rectifiable one which seems
"minor" in comparison to a long-term one.

~~~
colechristensen
Problems being that the disease is still going and not under control.

Also whole herds are being culled, producers would have to buy not just breed
and some are switching to other livestock.

~~~
mikedilger
I don't dispute any of that. I only wanted to head off a possible
misconception that the headline might have lead people to believe that losing
"one quarter" was going to be hard to recover from. It's definitely bad, but
also easy and quick to recover from.

------
ciconia
I'm surprised neither the article nor the comments on here discuss the problem
of genetic diversity. Practically all domesticated farm animals today are bred
in a highly controlled manner, and are selected for yield.

Here in France where I live, almost all chickens, pigs, cows etc are pure-bred
belonging to races (cows especially are registered in race registries). Take
for example our local cow race, the Charolais. These cows are famous for the
quality of their meat, but at the same time notorious for demanding constant
veterinary care and needing help in calving.

There's no doubt that all those diseases that break out every few years would
have much less chance of developping into global plagues if domestic animals
were more genetically diverse, but this would require rethinking our
priorities, and also perhaps our relationship with those animals that nourish
us.

------
ajb
Wow. I guess that's why China has a Strategic Pork Reserve[1]. I thought the
Pork Reserve was funny the first time i heard about it, but it's not so much
now.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/id/100795405](https://www.cnbc.com/id/100795405)

~~~
pergadad
Not as funny as Canada's strategic maple syrup reserve which at some point was
actually stolen...

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Oh. My. God. This is true:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist).

I'm going to write a movie out of this.

------
jjtheblunt
I read things like this and wonder what will move the tipping point to plant-
derived sources of essential amino acids (thus protein) adequately to stop
farming animals.

~~~
colechristensen
Poorly managed plant diseases are just as prevalent and often even harder to
control and eradicate.

Animal agriculture won't stop.

This disease process eliminates bad management and corrupt inefficient
government.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Are plant diseases less communicable to humans (and animals in general) ?

~~~
colechristensen
I don't know if this is a good faith question or not. But of course the
concern isn't people getting diseases from plants.

Crop yields go down and in some cases the resulting grain becomes poisonous to
people or animals which can in some cases cause disease (fungal most often).

~~~
jjtheblunt
good point, as i didn't word it correctly at all: how tricky is it to control
diseases _among_ plant cultivars?

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neonate
[http://archive.md/ItaXn](http://archive.md/ItaXn)

------
hpoe
I find this so interesting. Oftentimes we talk about wars, and treaties,
politicians and warlords as though most of the fate of the world depended upon
them. Yet this single outbreak of a disease will probably do just as much or
more damage to China than the trade war.

Now sure there are things that can be done and leaders are leaders precisely
because they are halp to organize and deal with problems at a large scale like
this, but there is so much that is still out of our control as humans.

It is humbling to think how vunerable we still are to mother nature despite
all of our progrsss. Maybe that is something we should keep in mind more, how
fragile and dependent we still are as people, nations and humanity.

~~~
gowld
This really only affects people who are obsessed with pig meat, which is a
non-essential luxury.

~~~
jessaustin
Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!

------
baybal2
A nice conclusion for the year of the pig :/

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scrumbledober
a week or two ago my Safeway was selling pork shoulders for $0.99/lb. Tuesday
I went back and they had whole cooked hams for $0.99/lb. I have been wondering
why pork has been so cheap and to see that there is such a global shortage
seems counterintuitive. Perhaps domestic farmers have increased production
with China importing more pork, leaving a domestic supply surplus?

~~~
pergadad
Scary to think what conditions those animals had to live in that selling 1lb
for 1$ is even remotely profitable.

~~~
wil421
Pork shoulder should be the cheapest part of the pig. It doesn’t mean the pig
wasn’t profitable. The shoulder doesn’t require much processing by the grocer
especially if it’s bone-in.

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talles
Meat prices are considerably higher around here in Brazil. My local butcher
says that it's due to Chinese importation.

------
xvilka
Hopefully, it will lead to better plant-based diet adoption.

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jankotek
Clickbaitish title, most pigs are slaughtered before reaching one year of age.

~~~
gruez
That's a very uncharitable way of interpreting the headline. From the article
body: "the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the
world’s pigs".

~~~
jobigoud
What he's saying is that 100% of those pigs that died due to the epidemic
would also have died within a year anyway. The title is crafted in such a way
that you picture a whole, static population of pigs and a quarter is removed
from this whole. Like we start 2020 with 75% of the individuals of 2019. As if
the mortality rate shot from something normal up to 25%. When it actually was
100% all along.

Without the epidemic title could have been "All of the worlds pigs died in a
year due to humans killing them to eat their body parts".

Not saying the epidemic is a good thing, but at the end of the day it doesn't
make a whole lot of difference from an individual pig's perspective.

------
TruffleLabs
The NY Times mis-used “swine fever” in the sub title.

It should be African Swine Fever, which is not swine fever, which is really
Classical Swine Fever.

And these are not to be confused with swine flu (aka H1N1).

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amelius
Criminals were using drones to make the fever spread faster, see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968)

~~~
jandrese
That story is pretty hard to believe. It might be true, but it reads like so
much scaremongering and blame deflection.

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swayvil
This makes me wonder, who's factory pig-farms are more hellish? China's or
USA's?

You might think that China's notorious inhumanity gives their factory farms a
leg-up. But there might be hellishness-ceiling that Chinese and USAian factory
farms both meet.

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digitalsushi
Well, as someone built very similarly to a pig, that is distressing news.

This is why I don't save 100% of my money for retirement. It's good to live
while being alive.

~~~
tempsy
what?

~~~
mschuster91
GP probably refers to their body shape, and references people who save every
dime they can while working and then not living long enough to actually have
enjoyed life or retirement.

~~~
ves
I’d assume gp was referring to the fact that humans and pigs are genetically
very similar and not that gp is out of shape or something.

