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Short thread on soy beans, the trade war, and ASF. When the trade war was ramping up a year ago was right about the time ASF started really taking off. There are multiple difficult factors to disentangle about how much ASF and the trade war hurt US soy bean sales. 1/n
For instance, the farmers planted in the spring of 2018 and would have been shipping in late summer and fall. By then we knew ASF was happening but data and news was so tightly restricted no body really had a good idea. So you have both timing and information problems 2/n
I have heard knowledgeable people I respect make the case that probably the entire soy bean issue in 2018-2019 is really due to the trade war and others make the case it is due almost exclusively to ASF. I'm not ready to render a verdict because we don't have the data 3/n
or the quality of information to say with any certainty. I'm sure once the job market paper comes out, you will see some mix of the two factors. However, and this is the important point, going forward the trade war is absolutely not in anyway responsible for soy bean problems 4/n
Using official data, Chinese pig population has collapsed MORE than the entire pig population of North America. Unofficially, using round numbers, China has lost the same number of pigs as if you killed almost every pig in the world except those in China and Europe. 5/n
What should scare you even more is that my people tell me this thing is still not remotely contained in China and it appears to be spreading across borders. To bring this back to the trade war, there is a valid debate how much to blame ASF or the trade war over soy bean 6/n
problems in 2018. Going forward and for the next few years, the trade war is not not not not not not not not not not NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT responsible for US soy bean farmers struggles selling to China given the collapse of the primary consumer.
