North Carolina-to-Japan pork pipeline quickly becoming state's top export

The fasting growing export from North Carolina is pork shipped to Japan, Andrew Curliss reports for the Raleigh News & Observer as part of a series called "High on the Hog." At the beginning of the 21st century, "the value of pork shipped from North Carolina to Japan was below $30 million a year in today’s dollars. It now tops $250 million."

"Late last year, in an unnoticed milestone in a decade-long trend, pork from North Carolina jumped ahead of tobacco as the state’s top direct export to Japan," Curliss writes. Overall, Japan "will buy about $2 billion in U.S. pork this year, making it far and away the No. 1 export market for American hog farmers." (Observer graphic: Meat exports out of North Carolina are catching up with tobacco exports)

The Japanese don't crave just any pork. Connoisseurs are looking for a specific taste and flavor—one that's silky, with a deeper color and fatter and sweeter, Curliss writes. That's where farmers like Bob and Ted Ivey come in. They "are part of a weekly race against time and circumstance to deliver the pork fresh—never frozen—from barns east of Raleigh to the world’s largest metropolis. It has become an unyielding effort to penetrate the demanding Japanese marketplace, where pork is consumed with a passion akin to North Carolinians and their barbecue."

"This pork-to-Japan pipeline is a prime example of how the global marketplace shapes North Carolina far beyond the potent Research Triangle Park," Curliss writes. "Today’s worldwide economy reaches places as basic and seemingly homebound as a hog barn in Eastern North Carolina."

Dermot J. Hayes, an expert on the pork economy and a professor at Iowa State University, told Curliss, “Japanese consumers are very finicky, very rich and they demand quality. So the people who export to Japan—they export a very high-value product. And that returns a lot of money.”

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For the Iveys, about 300 of their boars "will produce about 1.3 million market hogs this year in North Carolina," Curliss writes. "Of those, the cuts from about 200,000 will make it to Japan as Silky Pork." (Read more)

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