Is this why China became more compliant in trade talks? Yet domestic frozen pork belly inventory is at record highs. Thanks Mr. Trump for saving our bacon.

One-Quarter of World's Pigs Died In a Year Due To Swine Fever In China

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times:

The [African swine fever disease] was first reported in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in early August 2018. By the end of August 2019, the entire pig population of China had dropped by about 40 percent. China accounted for more than half of the global pig population in 2018, and the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world's pigs. By late September, the disease had cost economic losses of one trillion yuan (about $141 billion), according to Li Defa, dean of the College of Animal Science and Technology at China Agricultural University in Beijing. Qiu Huaji, a leading Chinese expert on porcine infectious diseases, has said that African swine fever has been no less devastating "than a war" -- in terms of "its effects on the national interest and people's livelihoods and its political, economic and social impact."

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The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Which explains a lot.