Tradeoff analysis of the pork supply and food security under the influence of African swine fever and the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Abstract

China is the world's largest consumer of pork and grains. However, African swine fever (ASF) and the COVID-19 outbreak have greatly impacted the pork supply and food security in China. How can food security and the pork supply be ensured under the dual impacts of COVID-19 and ASF? This is a major problem to be urgently solved by the Chinese government. This study indicated that the main pork production and sales areas in China were separated, which reflected the spatial imbalance between the supply and demand. The total area of suitable selected sites for pig farms in China is 21.5 million ha. If only the areas with levels of high and moderate suitability are considered as potential sites for pig farms, the potential pork production can reach 56.1 million tons in China, which is slightly lower than demand. Due to the impact of the ASF epidemic, the food consumed by pigs has been reduced by 34.7 million tons. However, with increasing pork productivity in the future, the self-sufficiency rate of grains may further decline. On the premise that the quality of people's life is not affected, the diversification of meat supply channels should be realized in an orderly and sustainable way, which might alleviate the pressure on food supply. This study provides a theoretical reference for the spatiotemporal layout of the swine industry and addresses the issue of food security in China under the influence of ASF and the COVID-19 outbreak.

Keywords

African swine fever / COVID-19 outbreak / Suitability analysis / Food security / Pork production potential

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the reviewers for providing us constructive suggestions on the manuscript. This research was Funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41625001,31660233). We are grateful for the Data Center for Resources and Environmental Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “China Statistical Yearbook” and other databases, website and yearbook for sharing data used in this paper.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.geosus.2022.01.005.

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