The Chinese pigs

The Catalan government wants us to eat more pork. And to achieve this, it has decided to talk about pork a lot. A whole lot. Statements, press releases, press conferences. And now, an institutional advertising campaign. All pork, all the time. It's a bold strategy. As bold as recommending skydiving on the same day the news opens with a plane crash.

Insisting on a product when it's associated with a threat is a highly effective way to generate rejection. You don't need to be Kahneman to understand this. If the dominant information is "swine fever," the message "eat pork" becomes a source of anxiety in the supermarket aisle. And when someone is anxious, they change their behavior. Given the need to avoid imagined risks, someone will buy Chinese pork rather than Catalan pork. Not because it's safer, but because it's further away from the headline.

The more we talk about it, the bigger the problem seems. The best campaign would be silence. Let pork go back to being just pork. An everyday product. Invisible. Like bread. Nobody campaigns to get us to eat bread. And, strangely enough, it works.

This is where the Chinese pigs win. China raises tariffs on Spanish pork in retaliation for European policy on electric cars. Pigs versus batteries. Hams versus engines. The economy turned into a Risk board where the pieces aren't armies, but products.

Punishing pigs for putting pressure on electric cars protects no one: not the Chinese consumer, who will pay more for meat; not the Spanish producer, who will lose market share; not the European car manufacturer, who will continue to face Chinese competition for technological, not porcine, reasons; not even the Chinese manufacturers, who have already decided to come here and make their presence felt.

But that's how modern trade policy works. Principles are no longer debated; collateral damage is exchanged. If you don't buy my cars, I won't buy your pigs. As if the global economy were a schoolyard argument. And then we're surprised when markets react badly or supply chains become fragile.

The irony is that, in the end, we all talk about pigs. In Catalonia, out of fear. In Brussels, for strategic reasons. In Beijing, as a form of retaliation. The pig, a noble animal, has become the perfect metaphor for our economic confusion: we believe we control consumption by talking, and that we control geopolitics by punishing it.

If this week's economic news teaches us anything, it's that the more we talk about pork, the worse it gets for pork. And for us, too. Beware of those Chinese pigs; they might end up being a promotional gift with the purchase of one of their electric cars. Don't laugh, though; newspapers used to give away paellas on Sundays at newsstands.