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The coronavirus outbreak has impacted the U.S. food supply chain, including the disease infecting workers at meat processing plants, causing operations to shut down and resulting in slaughtering of livestock that can’t be processed and shipped to retailers.

Some restaurant chains are also facing shortages, including Wendy’s, which announced it had run out of beef for burgers.

But at the same time the U.S. is facing meat and protein shortages, pork and other exports to China have soared.

Reuters published an analysis on the parallel phenomenon:

Meatpackers and livestock producers in the United States have spent at least a year adjusting to the surge in business to China, which has faced a severe pork shortage in the wake of its battle against African swine fever.

But now, as the United States is on the brink of its own meat crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, American pork supplies are being shipped off to China at a breakneck pace, creating the perfect recipe for additional U.S.-China tensions.

For some American consumers, the optics of this situation might be poor given how the virus originated in China late last year. But record U.S. meat exports to China have been the plan all along, to satisfy both China’s needs and to lift U.S. business.

The Chinese connection is tied to trade deals with the United States, one of the main pillars of the Trump administration agenda, and agreements that pre-date the coronavirus outbreak, the Associated Press (AP) reported