What food is sold between US and China?

[leastprime]

Originally Posted by moguldreamer

Yikes!

What I don't understand is why so many chips are manufactured elsewhere even though the equipment cost is the same in Asia vs USA. I can't believe that the fab labor, packaging, and ATE cost to be that much different in automated factories.

[leastprime]

Originally Posted by oneasterisk

Which is smart for them to control the supply if they have a huge demand.

Trump put export controls on pork which rippled down to the producers. Fortunately pig producers are not a big part of the voting population even in Iowa.
retail pork prices are currently pretty good, if you know where to look.

Smithfield, even under Chinese ownership, produces under the laws of the USA and suffers at the political whims of whomever is in power. Maybe Smithfield & et.al. are shipping to an intermediatiary country to bypass restrictions-don't really know.

[Listener2307]

Originally Posted by Mathguy

China has only about 75% of the arable land that the US has, and 3x the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_u...ics_by_country

This is a really important point.
The American Great Plains is the largest unbroken portion of arable land in the world. We sometimes do not realize how lucky this continent is. No, it did not have an animal that could be trained for labor and food, like cattle (Bison cannot be tamed and used), but it does have an enormous amount of natural resources in other areas.
Functionally, China is an island, with huge deserts to the west and ocean to the east, Siberia to the north, and mountains to the south.
Politically, they have made a terrible mistake by trying to become an export-based economy while fostering their own aggressive foreign policy. Did they think they would p**s no one off with their aggression?

[artillery77]

Mao's collectivized farming brought all Chinese farmland to heel of the government and set the country back a generation. The inroads other nations have bought into the US is a bit alarming. Without more protein markets, our farmers produce commodity crops. During covid, demand for our imported New Zealand lamb went through the roof while American producers languished. (NZ lamb is smaller and a preferred purchase for grocery buys, American lamb is larger and used in restaurants) Making things worse in prime ranchland near Wyoming/SD/Nebraska is JBS (Brazil) buying the last local harvester of lamb for local markets. So lamb producers were being put out of business while I was air freighting in lamb as fast as possible to keep up with demand.

How it relates. The US consumer mostly wants to eat racks and ground lamb. The market for the other primals.....is China and they pay the same per pound. The disconnect becomes perception of quality. Old tricks like feeding lamb grain (they bloat and gain water weight) right befofe harvest now effectively make the price of product worth less....so smaller groups of producers really should band together to setup their own harvesting groups if they want to capture the premium markets.

But that is the problem with US food exports. We export commodity, we import luxury. Despite a huge favorable balance on exports, that misstep makes us a net dollar food importer.

Also, China buys huge chunks of other countries to farm. See what they did to Ethiopia.