Residents buy pork at a local market in Yunyang, Southwest China's Chongqing on Thursday. Photo: IC

China on Thursday released a second 10,000 tons of state pork reserves into the market, a week after its first release, in a move to further stabilize market supply and tame prices which have soared due to the outbreak of African swine fever.

The China Merchandise Reserve Management Center, a state-owned company that manages the reserves, said on Tuesday that it would auction the second batch of 10,000 tons of frozen pork on Thursday afternoon.

Governments have been intensively rolling out measures to ease the tightened supply of pork, such as releasing state reserves and subsidizing pig farms. Seven major ministries and commissions have raised pig production or pork price issues thus far in September, as reported by domestic news site china.com.cn on Thursday.

A seminar on stabilizing pig production in large-scale pig breeding enterprises was held in Beijing on Wednesday, according to a statement from China's Ministry of Agriculture.

A total of 50 representative enterprises attended the seminar, and six of those presented their experiences of resuming and stabilizing pig production.

Local authorities and companies have also been actively launching measures to increase pork supply. On September 14, East China's Zhejiang Province released a batch of pork from its reserves, priced 30 percent lower than market prices, according to media reports.

Besides striving to resume pig production, China has begun expanding imports from other countries.

Pork imports through Tianjin Port totaled at 314,000 tons from January to August, up 30.8 percent year-on-year, chinanews.com reported on Thursday, citing data from Tianjin Customs.

Over half of the pork recently imported through Tianjin Port originated in the EU, with average prices soaring up to 40 percent over the previous year, said the report.

China on September 13 announced it would exempt US pork and soybean from additional tariffs.

A total of 10,900 tons of US pork was sold to China in the week ended September 5, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture.