EU - At the beginning of the week, the European pig slaughter market appeared in an overall steady way.
Unchanged quotations are reported from Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Ireland, the majority thus remaining on last week’s level.
In Spain, the quotation is also moving sideward again after the past weeks’ price decreases. A slightly positive trend was even reported from France and Great Britain.
All in all, supply and demand are quite well balanced. No backlog supply resulted from the missing day of slaughter on Whit Monday.
In Austria, the record slaughter weights have gone down from 98 kg to 97 kg within no more than two weeks. Now that the prices stopped going down in Spain, the Spanish are in a standby position for facing the seasonal price increase, caused by the numerous holidaymakers boosting the meat consumption. At the same time, there is complaint from Spain about the stagnation in export demand.
A problem was posed by the Russian barriers to import, by the South Korean livestock which increased again after the foot-and-mouth epidemic, by the severely decreased pig prices in China and by the devaluated yen in Japan.
Trend for the German market: After the Whit Weekend, the slaughter companies’ demand for live pigs continues to be good. Yet, the weather forecast announces temperatures to remain cool this week. At least, the prices are estimated to remain steady by the market participants.