Hungary begins pork knuckle supply to China
Hungary becomes the 22nd country with import access to China’s meat market and the 15th country with access to the pork market, according to the Tianjin office of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) which licenses imports. It did not elaborate on who bought the pork.
An increasingly frequent visitor to Beijing is Peter Szijjarto, Hungarian minister for foreign affairs and trade, who has been making a big push to increase exports to China. The Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region accounted for only US$60 billion of the US$560bn-worth of EU-China trade in 2014.
Hungary is also keen to ship beef and, ultimately, milk to China. In November 2014, Hungarian minister for agriculture Sándor Fazekas signed a protocol with Zhi Shuping, head of AQSIQ. Hungarian agricultural exports are worth €8bn per year and rising fast, the Hungarian minister told Zhi, whose agency monitors the quality of China’s food exports and imports.
The imports from Hungary may be timely, given China has stopped pork imports from its main Eastern European pork suppliers. Poland had a 7.3% share of China’s pork imports in 2013, selling 42,738 tons; that made it China’s sixth-largest source of imports, after Denmark. However, China has a ban in place on Polish imports on disease grounds.
Eastern Europe has been able to arrange a string of agricultural access deals with China, though it remains to be seen what kind of volumes result from these deals, notes a western Beijing-based European agricultural executive, distributing bovine and pork genetics to Chinese breeders. "The Lithuanians have been really keen to sell dairy cows, but before any animals were shipped, the [Chinese] dairy market went flat, so nothing has happened."
China has certainly been courting eastern Europe as a gateway to Europe. In December an "agreement on Customs clearance facilitation" was signed by Chinese premier Li Keqiang and Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orbán (Serbia and Macedonia are also included in the accord) at the summit of China and Central and Eastern European Countries.
Li Keqiang also promised China would create an investment fund of US$3bn to facilitate financing in the cash-strapped CEE markets. Agricultural products and infrastructure will be priorities for CEE cooperation, according to Wang Chao, secretary general of the permanent Secretariat for Cooperation Between China and Central and Eastern European Countries, speaking to the Chinese media earlier this month.
The only worry is that demand from China may be sluggish in 2015, given domestic pork prices remain largely flat. Hungary benefits from overall access to European pork in China, which has managed to increase sales in the market despite smaller volumes sold by US, Canadian and Brazilian pork exporters. Even with China’s increase in domestic production and low domestic prices, imports stayed at a relatively high level in 2014 thanks to "cheap and abundant" pork supplies from Europe, according to Joel Haggard, US Meat Export Federation senior vice-president for the Asia-Pacific.
