Bangkok, Thailand – Stewed, seasoned with sugar and cloves, deep-fried or dished up in a zingy chilli mince – the diets of most Thais are incomplete without pork.
But a $3bn market – supplied nearly entirely by domestic pig farmers – may be about to face competition like never before from the giant hog farms of the world’s third-largest producer, the United States.
While the fine print of the Thai government’s preliminary trade deal with the US is yet to be revealed, some details have emerged.
Washington has a 10,000-item-long wish list of goods it wants to enter Thailand duty-free to reduce its $45.5bn trade deficit with the Southeast Asian country, an imbalance President Donald Trump says unfairly disadvantages US producers.
The list includes pork, corn, soya beans and some fruits.
Shortly after Trump met Thailand’s caretaker prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Malaysia last month, the White House revealed some of the many strings attached to its trade deal, which set the tariff rate for the kingdom’s exports to the US at 19 percent.
They include Thailand agreeing to “address and prevent barriers to US food and agricultural products in the Thai market”, according to the White House, and a commitment to “expediting access” for US meat and poultry products.
That has panicked Thailand’s pig farmers, who say the industry may not survive a flood of cheaper, subsidised US pork, which is fattened up on ractopamine, a livestock additive banned in many countries, including the kingdom.
If US pork is allowed into Thailand without duties, nothing less than the kingdom’s food security is at stake, according to Worawut Siripun, deputy secretary-general of the Swine Raisers Association of Thailand.
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