Sun Haoyu, a hog farmer in Dalian, in northern China’s Liaoning Province, first noticed pork prices beginning to tumble late last year.
With 3,000 hogs to care for, Mr. Sun said, he had “no choice but to tough it out,” relying entirely on loans and borrowed money to keep his operation afloat. But prices kept plummeting, and last month they hit a 16-year low. Now, across his region, many small farms are on the brink of collapse.
“Many hog farmers can no longer hold out,” Mr. Sun said in an interview. “After all that backbreaking work raising hogs, we can barely afford the feed anymore.”
China’s plunging pork prices are more than an agricultural problem. In a country where the commodity is treated as a bellwether of inflation, the decline is an ominous sign for the economy.
Not long ago, pork prices were soaring after an epidemic of swine fever devastated the nation’s hogs. That prompted Beijing to ramp up production, creating a glut just as Chinese consumers were looking to save rather than spend.
The pork industry is another casualty of China’s economic slowdown. The property market is in a yearslong slump, dragging down spending, including at restaurants, a big driver of pork sales. Construction activity has also weakened, reducing demand for pork, long a staple for workers on building sites, according to a report from Nomura, the Japanese bank.
