As frequent readers of the blog are aware, I have an interest in the structure of the pig industry world wide. Such things as what countries are major producers of pork, trends in their production numbers, etc. The US is the world’s second largest country producing pork, with China 4-5x larger than the US in production. We are all aware of the impact of Chinese trade on our markets, with the recent decision of Chinese authorities to reopen their borders to US pork products welcomed by all.

In terms of being a supplier to world trade, China is not a concern, as they consume almost 100% of the pork they produce, with few plants in the country able to certify to world sanitary standards. However, Canada and the European Union are major suppliers of product to most of our foreign markets.

This past week I have been looking at the pork production numbers from the European Union members. If you are interested in delving further into the following numbers or have an interest in other European Union statistics, both ag and non-ag, you can go to the following website:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/eurostat/home

The EU requires member countries to report/estimate livestock inventories every November/December. The following table has the total pig inventories of the 6 countries in the EU with the largest inventories of pigs. To give me a point of reference, I also added the December 1 numbers from Iowa for each year in the table.

While we often hear about pork production in Denmark, they rank number 5 in the EU, and are an industry in a state of flux. Germany has the most pigs, and increasingly, these pigs are being born in Denmark and shipped to Germany as weaned pigs (sounds just like the Canadian and US situation doesn’t it). Spain has shown consistent growth over the 8 year period in the graph and is now a close second in inventory.

The pig numbers in Poland have taken a sharp down turn in the past 2 years, so much so that they now have less pigs than France. Their 2008 inventory is only 75% of the 2002 peak or 76% of the 2006 inventory. France, Denmark and the Netherlands have all shown steady to slowly declining inventories over the 8 year period.

I included Iowa inventory numbers in the table as a reference point. If Iowa were a member of the EU, it would be the 3^rd largest pig producer. In the world of pig production, Iowa would rank as the 5^th largest country, behind China, US, Germany and Spain. On December 1, 2008, Iowa had 29.6% of all pigs in the US herd.