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News Release
9-4-09
STATE, NATIONAL PORK PRODUCERS IN DIRE FINANCIAL STRAITS,
WARNS WEST VIRGINIA AGRICULTURE COMMISSIONER
America’s domestic pork industry could become a thing of the past unless current trends are reversed, according to Gus R. Douglass, longtime West Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture.
“The economics of the pork industry are just terrible right now,” Commissioner Douglass said. “Producers need help or this may become yet another industry outsourced to foreign countries.”
The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) says growers are losing an average of $21 on each hog marketed, economic conditions in the industry have been abysmal for the past two years, and futures prices indicate losses will stretch into 2010. Thousands of mostly rural jobs are at stake, according to the NPCC.
The crisis is the result of numerous factors, including high feed and energy prices and the current economic recession. Drops in consumer demand and foreign markets because of the H1N1 flu outbreak are also factors.
Although U.S. demand quickly rebounded after the H1N1 outbreak as consumers learned that the disease is not transmitted by eating pork, many key foreign markets remain closed to U.S. exports. Pork exports make up a quarter of the entire U.S. industry, so trade restrictions can have a sizable impact.
Canada recently enacted a support program for its pork producers that will create a pork marketing fund and provide long-term, government-back loans to producers.
The governors of nine states recently signed on to a letter to the President asking the Obama administration to:
- Support at least an additional $50 million of pork purchases for government feeding programs.
- Remove a spending cap on USDA’s Section 32 food-assistance program so that additional purchases of surplus agriculture products, including pork, can be made. (Congress imposed the cap as part of USDA’s fiscal 2009 budget.)
- Urge China to quickly lift a ban on U.S pork that was put in place because of the H1N1 flu outbreak and to eliminate other barriers to U.S. pork exports.
The NPCC sent a similar letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
“I would also like to see those measures implemented, and I would like more attention paid to the plights of small farmers throughout the country,” said Commissioner Douglass. “What is currently happening to U.S. pork producers already happened to West Virginia pork producers in the late-1960s. As a nation, we need to geographically diversify our agricultural production to protect the food supply from disease outbreaks and human threats.”
Swine have digestive systems different from ruminants such as cattle and sheep, which can eat grass and forage. Feed for commercial hogs is made mainly of corn and soybeans. As a result, economies of scale have concentrated the industry primarily in the “corn belt” states of the Midwest.
Approximately 1,000 farmers produced just 7,000 head in West Virginia in 2008. In the first year records were kept (1866), 11,000 growers produced 360,000 head. The peak production year was 1879 when farmers grew 425,000 head. Numbers declined steadily from that point on, but the state was still averaging around 100,000 head a year into the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The West Virginia Department of Agriculture protects plant, animal and human health through a variety of scientific, regulatory and consumer protection programs, as mandated by state law. The Commissioner of Agriculture is one of six statewide elected officials in West Virginia. Currently, Commissioner Gus R. Douglass is the longest-serving agriculture commissioner in the nation. For more information, visit www.wvagriculture.org.
“The Basis of All Wealth is Agriculture.”
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