Duties kill market for US-produced pig feet, heads

Feet, heads, hearts, tongues, kidneys, stomachs and entrails are parts of a pig that most people in the United States would shun, but are considered special in China.

"Chinese consumers have different preferences than US consumers. They value different parts of the animal," Dermot Hayes, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, told China Daily.

Those different parts, known collectively as offal or "variety meats", had been a moneymaking export for US pig farmers in 2017 with $874 million in sales to China, the top buyer of US variety meats last year.