The Other Cheap Meat: Pork Prices Spiral Lower Amid Trade War

(Bloomberg) -- Sign up for our new China newsletter, a weekly dispatch on where China stands now and where it's going next.

Pork just keeps getting cheaper.

At 65.61 cents a pound on Wednesday, the meat fetched the lowest wholesale price for the date in a decade. Hams, in particular, are spiraling, collapsing to 44.29 cents a pound, the lowest since April 2015.

The price crash is yet another knock-on effect from Donald Trump’s trade war. American meat production had already been in a boom period for some time, and then Chinese tariffs on U.S. pork weighed on exports, hurting a key component of demand. Mexico also placed duties on U.S. shipments last year.

The market is dropping to “a low enough price level to clear the short-term supply without help from exports,” Terry Roggensack, one of the founding principals at commodity researcher Hightower Report, said in a note Wednesday.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.