Hog markets are down sharply, with U.S. cash prices dropping more than 25 per cent over the past month.

H@ms Marketing Services' director of risk management Tyler Fulton says this comes partly because hog slaughter is reaching its height, in combination with a solid supply of beef and chicken.

But he also says the World Health Organization's (WHO) report from last month linking red meat with cancer risk seems to have affected pork demand.

"It's difficult to discern exactly what factors impacted the market, but the week after the WHO report came out on cancer risk, pork bellies in particular started to move lower," he says. "They've moved approximately 30 per cent lower over the last three weeks since that report came out."

Up until that point, Fulton says pork bellies had been critical in holding pork and hog values relatively high, with wholesale bacon prices collapsing subsequently.

October was also National Pork Month in the U.S., featuring promotions on pork, but since that's wrapped up, Fulton says it's been another contributing factor to slower demand.

He says it's hard to tell when prices will move up again, but thinks an increase in pork exports could help.

"We're still trending well below levels that we saw in 2013, but they are improving," he says. "It's a struggle, though, because the U.S. dollar has been relatively strong against a lot of the importing nation's currency values, and so it's difficult for U.S., and for that matter Canadian pork, to be competitive in some of the markets we typically rely on like Japan and China."