U.S. Pork Producers Lose $1 Billion in Trade Wars, Group Says

Pork chops are displayed for sale during the grand opening of a Whole Foods Market Inc. location in Burbank, California, U.S., on Wednesday, June 20, 2018. Customer traffic was up 2.4 percent at Whole Foods stores during the first five months of 2018, a sign that Amazon has managed to draw in new shoppers with ballyhooed price cuts on a handful of items. , Bloomberg

Mike Dorning, Bloomberg News

Jul 16, 2019

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(Bloomberg) -- U.S. pork producers are losing $1 billion annually because of the Trump administration’s trade wars, said David Herring, an industry association official.

Herring, president of the National Pork Producers Council, told a House Agriculture subcommittee on Tuesday that retaliatory tariffs by China and other countries imposed in trade disputes are “one of the most damaging threats” to his industry, costing producers $8 per animal.

“This year, the average hog farmer is making a very small profit through the first six months of the year,” Herring said. “Those small profits would be much higher were it not for trade retaliation from China and other markets.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mike Dorning in Washington at mdorning@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, ;Millie Munshi at mmunshi@bloomberg.net, Patrick McKiernan

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