For centuries farmers in southern China’s Xingang village have raised pigs, helping feed their country’s appetite for almost half the world’s pork.
But in recent years a nationwide drive to reduce water pollution and to steady pork prices has led to the mass closure of pig farms. Swaths of the country, where swineherding is so integral to rural culture that a pig with a roof over its head forms the Chinese character for “home”, have been transformed.
Banners in the village square now proudly proclaim Xingang free of pigs. “The entire township is pigless,” says He Lianhong, 42, who lost most of a Rmb200,000 ($30,000) investment when his farm of 200 hogs, Xingang’s largest, was bulldozed last year.
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