China to export chilled pork to Singapore for first time

China will begin exporting chilled pork to Singapore for the first time, officials and an exporter in Hunan Province in central China said.



The expansion of bilateral food trade comes more than a year after Singapore resumed importing frozen pork from China, following years of import bans imposed in 2018 due to the global African swine fever epidemic.



Peng Huifeng, deputy general manager of Hunan Huale Foodstuff Co., Ltd, a pork producer in Hanshou County in the city of Changde, told Xinhua that the first shipments are expected to arrive in Singapore in a little over a month.



This follows cooperation agreements reached on Dec. 15 at the annual meeting of the China-Singapore Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation held in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.



Under the food trade agreement, Chongqing and the provinces of Heilongjiang and Hunan will export pork and some processed pork products to Singapore.



While Chongqing and Heilongjiang supply processed cooked pork, Hunan is currently the only Chinese province approved to export chilled pork, frozen pork and processed pork products to Singapore, said Wu Shenshu, an official with the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of Hunan Province.