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‘Tis the season in China when whole hams and cured sausages should be flying off the shelves as households prepare for the Lunar New Year, the biggest festival in the nation’s calendar.

But as hundreds of millions grapple with an unprecedented Covid outbreak, the country’s fondness for the celebratory dishes that usually accompany gatherings with friends and family is in deep freeze. The price of pork, China’s favorite meat, has plunged.

The food industry is again bearing some of the harshest economic costs of the pandemic, although this time around the problem stems from the government’s abrupt exit from the Covid Zero policies that had shaped its response to the virus for three years. As infections rip through the population, fewer people are meeting up at home or in restaurants, and they’re spending less on pricier items like meat, while the sick eat lighter meals.

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Read More: ​​​​The Upcoming Lunar New Year Holiday Threatens a Grim COVID Toll in China

“Sales are slow and demand has been very sluggish,” said Zhou Huan, who runs a butchers shop in Beijing. Zhou said orders fell by about two-thirds from what might be expected at this time of year after the government effectively abandoned Covid Zero in early December. “People suddenly vanished. No one was out,” he said.

Pork is China’s staple protein, accounting for about 60% of all meat consumed in the world’s most populous country, according to McKinsey & Co. Raising hogs is a business that includes millions of family smallholders, to giant agricultural concerns, to the trading houses that ship animal feed from farmers as far afield as the US and Brazil to fatten the world’s biggest herd. And the lunar holiday, or Spring Festival, which falls this year at the end of January, is when pork is usually most in demand.

The numbers this year tell a different story, with weak consumption exacerbated by rising supply as farmers rush hogs to slaughter after the end of Covid Zero allowed freer movement of goods. Pork bought at China’s main wholesale markets fell to about 64,000 tons last month, almost half that of a year ago, according to the farm ministry. Producers are now losing money after pig prices dropped by about a third since the start of December, according to data from Shanghai JC Intelligence Co.

“Consumption may have hit rock bottom, but prices could fall further,” said Pan Chenjun, a senior analyst with Rabobank. “Pork demand this Spring Festival will be lower than last year and even worse than the year before. Covid cases have just peaked but it doesn’t mean that demand will come back immediately,” she said.

The ramifications extend beyond the domestic hog industry. Pork is a key food component in the consumer price index, so falling prices will be welcomed by a central bank wary of the inflationary impact of China’s reopening. The latest figures for December showed pork inflation decelerating on year, and contracting on a monthly basis. But the foreign farmers that supply animal feed will be less sanguine. China’s import bill for soybeans alone topped $60 billion last year.

Commodities markets broadly expect Chinese demand to recover from the second quarter as the population builds immunity to Covid and economic activity revives. But much depends on how strongly the economy can perform after slowing so dramatically in 2022, against the backdrop of a looming global recession.

Regarding pork, “demand should improve gradually going forward and overall consumption in 2023 would be better than 2022,” said Pan. “But there are also great uncertainties after the opening up, and it is unknown whether consumption can return to pre-Covid levels. A lot of factors are at play this year, like economic performance and unemployment rates.”

In the meantime, the impact of the surge in travel expected over Lunar New Year is in the balance. Newly won freedom from China’s crushing virus restrictions could lead to a splurge in spending as friends and families reunite.

But the event, which has been dubbed the world’s largest annual migration, is also likely to spread infection even further through the population. Beyond that, the risk is that three years of Covid Zero, including travel curbs, stay-at-home orders, and citywide lockdowns, will have chipped away at the usual patterns of consumption.

“It’s hard to quantify, but I am indeed eating less meat,” said Will Xu, a fund manager living in Shanghai, who got Covid in mid-December and who doesn’t plan to travel for the Spring Festival. “We also dine out less now. It seems the infection affected my appetite for meat.”

Katherine Swidan, whose son Mark has been imprisoned in China for over 10 years, has not seen even a photograph of him over the last decade. The last time she heard his voice was in 2018.

She and the families of other Americans, who according to the U.S. government are wrongfully held in China, are hoping that the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken can push the Chinese authorities for the release of their loved ones as he visits Beijing next month.

“My message for Blinken is: say their names,” said Katherine Swidan in a phone interview from her home in Luling, Texas. “They’re American citizens. They’ve been wrongfully detained. Enough is enough.”

Mark Swidan, a Texas-based businessman, was convicted by a Chinese court on drug-related charges despite a lack of evidence and in 2019 given a death sentence with reprieve. A United Nations working group has concluded he was arbitrarily detained in violation of international law.

The Biden administration’s recent high-profile prisoner swaps, such as basketball star Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in exchange for a convicted Russian arms dealer, have spurred calls for Washington to do more for U.S. citizens held in China, some of whom have languished for over a decade with little consular contact.

But the detainee issue often gets lost within the wider complexity of the U.S.-China relationship, which in recent years has sunk to its lowest point in decades.

And, unlike Griner, the U.S. citizens held in China are not well known to the American public.

Families of detained Americans say the freedom of their relatives should not be bundled up with challenging policy issues and should instead be addressed in a separate track focused on humanitarian matters.

“This cannot be treated as a long-term policy exercise,” said Harrison Li, the son of Chinese-American Kai Li who has been detained in China since 2016.

“My dad, he is not a complex policy issue. It’s a very clear cut-and-dry issue of an innocent American citizen being used as a pawn by the Chinese government to extract something,” Li said.

A Chinese court handed his father a 10-year jail sentence in 2018 for espionage. Kai Li denies the charges.

There have been talks in recent months, Li said, between Washington and Beijing over the Americans detained in China but they did not go anywhere. “And that’s why it’s so important for Secretary Blinken to use his upcoming trip next month to keep this issue in the spotlight and keep the negotiations going.”

Senior Biden administration officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink during a December visit to China, have told Chinese counterparts that securing the release of U.S. citizens who are wrongfully detained or subject to exit bans in China is a personal priority for the U.S. president.

While President Joe Biden raised the issue when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping in November, he did not mention the specific names of the detained Americans, according to sources familiar with their talks.

One person familiar with plans for Blinken’s trip to China said the top U.S. diplomat does intend to raise the names of high-profile detainees, including Mark Swidan, Kai Li and David Lin – an American pastor detained in China since 2006 – as well as others during talks.

The State Department declined to offer details of “ongoing diplomatic conversations” when asked about efforts to secure prisoner releases, but a department spokesperson told Reuters that Blinken “is personally focused on and prioritizes bringing home U.S. nationals wrongfully detained” in China.

The United States does not provide an official figure for how many citizens are detained abroad, but The Dui Hua Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the release of political prisoners in China, estimates there are more than 200 Americans in China alone who are wrongfully detained or facing coercive measures, such as exit bans.

John Kamm, the chairman of Dui Hua, believes that China could be ready to compromise on detainees for the sake of the overall relationship with the United States.

Former U.S House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit last year to Taiwan severely strained bilateral ties, but U.S. officials have said they believe China wants to stabilize relations as it faces domestic economic headwinds and spiking COVID-19 cases.

“The area where China can make concessions to improve the relationship – which is what they say they want to do – is in the area prisoner releases,” Kamm said.

“We have an opportunity. I hope that’s being pushed very, very hard.”

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The Taliban took over Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 but governments around the world are still grappling on whether to recognize the hardline Islamist regime.

ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/POOL/AFP via Getty Image

• The Twitter accounts of at least two Taliban officials were sporting blue ticks on Monday, per the BBC.
• That sparked an outrage and by Tuesday, the ticks appear to have been removed.
• Governments around the world the world are still grappling with whether to recognize the hardline Islamist regime.

Top Taliban officials and their supporters — who sported Twitter’s $8 a month blue verified badges up until Monday — appear to no longer be Twitter verified after a BBC report sparked outrage. 

The BBC reported Monday that the Twitter accounts of at least two Taliban officials and four well-known supporters of the regime were sporting the checkmarks. They include Hedayatullah Hedayat, head of the Taliban’s department for “access to information”, and Abdul Haq Hammad, who heads the regime’s media watchdog. They have about 190,000 and 170,000 followers, respectively.

The accounts are no longer accompanied by the check marks on Tuesday evening.

It’s unclear if Twitter removed the blue badges from the Taliban-linked accounts, or if the account owners unsubscribed from the Twitter Blue service. Hedayat’s account last had its paid-for blue tick removed in December, the BBC reported citing local media.

Twitter and Afghanistan’s information and culture ministry did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours. Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has disbanded the company’s communications team.

Twitter Blue is a paid subscription service that charges users for a blue checkmark next to their account names and offers early access to certain features. The program costs $8 a month for web users in the US and is one of CEO Elon Musk’s strategies to monetize the platform — which he said was losing $4 million a day. 

The Taliban’s presence on Western social media is a point of contention and controversy as the US and governments around the world grapple with whether to recognize the hardline Islamist regime. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, it has committed numerous human rights violations, the United Nations mission in the country said in July 2022. The regime has also banned women from attending universities.

Social media platforms too, had to make a choice — Facebook and YouTube have banned the Taliban, but not Twitter. Former President Donald Trump slammed the Taliban’s presence on Twitter in October 2021, months after his own account was suspended permanently. 

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump said in a press release announcing the launch of Truth Social in October 2021. “This is unacceptable.”

Trump’s account was reinstated by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, in November 2022.