Dear readers,
Not much is happening in the first week of the year, let’s see a few
good news:
• The Catalan Minister of Agriculture confirmed that the outbreak of African
swine fever(ASF) detected at the end of November, which has already
resulted in the deaths of 29 wild boars, has not originated from the IRTACReSA facilities in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona).
• The Spanish Incarlopsa company announced the acquisition of Embutidos
Bricio, a company with nearly 40 years of experience in the production of
white pork products. Embutidos Bricio had a turnover of approximately €4.4
million in 2024, selling 1.3 million units of products.
• A group of consumers have filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s,
claiming the McRib sandwich doesn’t contain any actual pork rib meat, and
instead is comprised from ground-up portions of lower-grade pork products
and, by branding it as such, the fast food chain deceives reasonable
consumers, who believe the product “will include at least some meaningful
quantity of actual pork rib meat, which commands a premium price on the
market.” Believe me, if you check the price of the sandwich and haver some
basic knowledge of the meat market, it is easy to find out that some could
make a more than reasonable profit on selling the real product.
• Marco Tschanz, CEO of Bell Food Group, in an interview to the Neue Zürcher
Zeitung newspaper asserted that the boom in meat analogues is over, as their
sales are currently growing at a rate of between 0 and 1%. It is a niche
product, he explained, “primarily because of its taste, which is not
comparable to that of meat.” And they are often “highly processed products
with numerous additives”. Bell Food Group, Switzerland’s largest meat
processor, intends to continue focusing on conventional meat. Consumers
are awakening.
Who Let the Dogs Out?
My dear readers. I am from the East of Europe , working in a range of small
countries. Here everything is considered a conspiracy(but isn’t it?). Sometimes
conspiracies worth to be debated.
Politics intervein more and more also in the pig industry. A recent proof is
the Philippines giving pork import licenses to some Russian companies, while
Spain is banned, for the moment. I don’t remember to hear any regionalization
of Russia on ASF issues…Anyhow, sovereignty, open and closed markets are not
new subjects, I recommend again “Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and
the Secret History of Capitalism “, by Ha-Joon Chang.
This weekend had one shocking event: the president of Venezuela, Nicolas
Maduro, has been extracted from his home by the Delta Force and transferred
to a prison in the U.S. It’s a huge shift in the policy of president Trump, who has
recently received the FIFA peace trophy(this is not a joke). Now everyone is
expecting the further developments. Redesigning maps, spheres of influence,
rise and fall of empires. Obviously, it will affect also the pork trade.
The official reason for the action against Maduro is drug trafficking. If this is true, first target should have been Mexico, as all the data show this country as source of 98% of the fentanyl arriving to the US. Even more, the Mexicans are producing it form precursors purchased from Chinese suppliers.
I am switching now from books to movies. “Wag the Dog” is a film released
in late 1997, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro, categorized initially
as a political satire. The plot: a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who
fabricate a war in Albania, in order to distract the voters from a sex scandal
involving the president of the U.S. The twist of faith: a month later the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal erupted. Mr. Clinton may have seen the movie, because soon
3 other events turned the attention of the voters away from the scandal and
his impeachment: bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, bombing of
Iraq and bombing of Serbia, close to the Albanian border.
Mr. Trump is in a similar situation. His popularity is rapidly decreasing, the
Epstein files are allegedly involving him in a sexual scandal and the Republican
party is looking like the big looser of the mid-term elections planed for
November 2026. In my opinion, the intervention in Venezuela may be just a
distraction. Whatever the motivation, the action will redraw trade routes and
alliances.
The one move I could still imagine is the reedition of the Bay of Pigs
invasion in Cuba, it has more chance now and it would feed Trumps ego, by
winning where Kennedy didn’t.
The term of “wagging the dog” has originated from the saying “a dog is
smarter than its tail, but if the tail were smarter, then it would wag the dog.”
Who let the dogs out?
