What if China's African swine fever wave deepens?
A deeper ASF cull of China's sow herd forces record pork imports and reprices global protein — long hogs/lean-meat and a China-CPI pork spike; the crude-collapse cascade is misattributed (ASF lifts grain/protein, it doesn't crush oil). Rhymes with the 2018-19 ASF epizootic that halved China's herd, doubled pork, and spiked CPI. Transmission: pulls in Brazilian/US/EU pork and soymeal feed demand. Forward: post-2019 herd consolidation into big biosecure farms means culls are contained faster, so the price impulse is real but shallower than the 2019 shock.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. The ongoing 2026 ASF wave accelerates into a deeper cull of China's sow herd, forcing record pork imports and repricing global protein. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Food inflation ▲ · Pandemic shock ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.