ZHOUCUN (China) • When Mr Zhang Faqing received a letter from the government last December ordering him to close his pig farm on the outskirts of Beijing with just two weeks of notice, he thought it was a joke..
ZHOUCUN (China) • When Mr Zhang Faqing received a letter from the government last December ordering him to close his pig farm on the outskirts of Beijing with just two weeks of notice, he thought it was a joke.
However, after local officials visited his farm in Zhoucun village a few days later, the 47-year old realised it was no laughing matter.
Almost one year later, he is still waiting for millions of yuan in compensation promised by the government, more than a dozen pig pens that used to house his 15,000 hogs stand empty and he is still at a loss about what to do.
«I had to sell (my pigs) at whatever price the buyers offered, so I basically sold the meat at the price of cabbage. I lost so much money,» he said on a recent visit to his farm. He lost more than 70 million yuan (S$14.4 million), he said.
Mr Zhang is among hundreds of thousands of small pig and poultry farmers across the country who have been forced to close as Beijing wages a three-year campaign to clean up the world’s biggest livestock sector.
