United States-The Legacy of swine flu.

UNITED STATES-LONG TERM EFFECT OF SWINE FEVER HYPE.

U.S. pork producers will grapple with the fallout from the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak for weeks, or longer, predicts Purdue University agricultural economist Chris Hurt.

"This couldn’t get much worse for the pork industry," Hurt says in a university release. Hundreds of millions of pounds of pork could end up in supermarket cases at discounted prices, he warns.

Of particular concern to Hurt has been the reaction of the industry’s major export markets, including China and Russia, the second- and fourth-largest international buyers of U.S. pork, respectively. Together, they represented 27.4 percent of the country’s pork exports last year, the release points out.

Ultimately, the economic effects will ripple throughout the agricultural economy, Hurt said. The pork industry consumes 28 percent of the grains and 23 percent of the protein meals fed to livestock. "If this flu event causes demand for pork to drop, that means less usage of corn and soybean meal with downward impacts on those prices, as well," he says.

Still, Hurt expects that the H1N1 outbreak will have far less of an impact on the pork industry than BSE did on the beef industry in 2003 or avian influenza did on the poultry industry in 2005-’06.