Dead Pigs: The Epilogue

The final tally of dead pigs from last week's "Shanghai Swine Tsunami" (maybe I should copyright that) is 12,000.   That's a lot of putrid pork, and it got me thinking; could this festering flood have an impact on the market price of pork in China?  After all, on the same day I read the 12K death toll, there was another article stating that the Chinese consumer price of pork had fallen 10% in recent months.

Pork for sale at a typically unsanitary-looking Hong Kong outdoor market

 

Hmmm, could there be a connection?  One would think a shortage of pork caused by a mass die off would drive prices upward, unless of course the dead pigs really were going to the slaughterhouse, flooding the market as it were with low cost meat.  I decided to resolve this suspicion with some mathematical analysis:

• 12,000 pigs, waterlogging aside would weigh somewhere around 2.4 million pounds
• The non-muslim human population of China is estimated at 1.4 billion, give or take
• If we divide the 2.4 million lbs. of "off the market" meat into the above human population, this works out to .002 pounds of pork per consumer.  2 thousandths of a pound, less than 1/30th of an ounce.

I am going to conclude two things based on this.  First, this is not enough to have a significant impact on prices, and second, the scale of everything in China is really, really huge.  2.4 million pounds of meat is a blip in a market this size, nothing more.