Two years ago, China was gripped by what was described as an epic pig problem. For most Chinese people, pork is a main staple so rapidly rising pig prices could have presented a serious challenge to an economy already at that time besieged by massive negative forces. It was another headache officials in that country really didn’t need.

For economists and the media, however, China’s possible porcine nightmare was written about in the most glowing of terms (scrubbed, of course, of any mentions of livestock). The mainstream was looking for any small bit of confirmation that “transitory” was a real factor and not just something Janet Yellen dreamed up out of desperation. A spark of ignition in Chinese inflation would have been as good as, if not better than, a similar one for American or European inflation.

Why not pigs?

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, food inflation (including tobacco; the NBS changed its methodology to include it in the food index to begin 2016) spiked to 5.8% in February 2016. It was just in the nick of time given all the downturn negatives proliferating across the world, a technocratic reprieve from all that was going wrong especially by monetary indication.

Because it was only ever the pig population, however, it was Chinese food inflation that ultimately proved to be transitory. There really was never any reason to believe otherwise, as I wrote back in April 2016:

The reason for this massive spike in pork prices is Chinese supply of pigs, meaning the curiously shrinking inventory of animals. Pig farmers have exited the business in great numbers over the past few years as prices had declined (oversupply) and serious disease (porcine epidemic diarrhea) made smaller producers too inefficient to survive…

The vast majority of the time since June 2012 when the CPI fell below 3% for the first time this “cycle” it has remained significantly below. It is why you go looking into pig populations, breeding herd counts, and the seasonal behavior of Chinese wholesale pork markets, to analyze below the surface and the headlines to figure whether trends are changing or just individual circumstances.