China breeds leaner, meatier pig to bring home the bacon in food security drive

The new breed grows faster, produces more lean meat and shows stronger resistance to disease compared to mainstream imports, geneticists from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences were quoted as saying.

The Lansi pig is the product of 14 years of trials using over 2,000 swine from mainstream breeds originating in the United States and the United Kingdom. It recently received approval from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs for commercial use.

Over that long period of testing and analysis, the researchers developed software and databases that will help accelerate the breeding process in the future, said team lead Li Kui.

“[We will] continue breeding, improve features like meat quality, widen application and increase the market share of China-bred hogs,” he said.

Feng Yonghui, chief analyst at industry website Soozhu, said the achievement in the laboratory still needs to pass the open market’s trial by fire.

“It depends on whether the pig will be competitive in terms of comprehensive economic benefits,” he said.

China’s home-grown pigs have generally been fattier than their Western counterparts, with less lean meat and a slower rate of growth. Farmers began introducing breeds from overseas in the 1980s.

Since then, the country’s pig farming industry has “fallen into a vicious circle of introduction, degeneration, introduction”, Feng said, as industry players – mostly smaller in size – neglect new technologies and techniques.

Last year, China produced nearly 58 million tonnes of pork – half the world’s total output, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Despite a decline in recent decades, the share of pork in China’s overall meat consumption remains high at over 50 per cent, said Feng, the industry analyst.

“This is a staple food that we must keep in our own hands. Breeding pigs are like chips in pig production, and they are the core of the production system,” he said.

In a plan for livestock and poultry covering the period from 2021 to 2035, the country vowed to achieve a self-sufficiency rate of more than 95 per cent in major farm animals by 2035 – measured by the proportion of genetic sequences originating from domestic husbandry.

Last year, the agriculture ministry said this rate was already over 75 per cent.