On September 27th 2016, as according to the official website of the Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the PRC (AQSIQ), the Chinese government ended the ban on Italian pork meat, which had already been lasting for 17 years.
The ban has been decided since, in 1999, some traces of swine vesicular disease (SVD) have been found in a batch of pork meat imported from Italy.
The approval arrived after 10 years of negotiations between the Italian government and the Chinese AQSIQ. A joint effort by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Health and the Italian Embassy in China aimed to demonstrate to AQSIQ that Italian pork meat is now free from SVD.
The Italian Minister of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, Mr. Maurizio Martina, declared that the end of the ban is a very important result for the Italian industry, and a “decisive step forward”.
By the way, currently, the ban has been removed just for pork meat produced in Northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna, Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Liguria, Lombardia, Piemonte, Marche, Val d’Aosta, Trentino Alto Adige e Veneto).
Since China is the world leading pork meat consumer (60% of the global pork meat), specialists forecast that many Italian companies will try to “re-open” the Chinese market again, maybe creating a local production line, satisfying, in this way, the huge Chinese demand.