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

At 65.61 cents a pound on Wednesday, the meat fetched the lowest wholesale price for the date in a decade.

The Other Cheap Meat: Pork Prices Spiral Lower Amid Trade War
Sealed cuts of pork sit in crates inside a wholesale food distribution depot in Germany. (Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg)

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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.

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

To contact the reporter on this story: Lydia Mulvany in Chicago at lmulvany2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Millie Munshi, Patrick McKiernan

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