Lean hogs has become the second best performing commodity so far this year, rising 6.5 per cent, according to Macquarie Research.

Pig meat is just behind iron ore, and in front of commodities that are traditional considered safe-havens such as gold, silver and zinc.

The price rise follows China importing 45 per cent more pork in 2015 after it culled almost 100 million hogs and 10 million sows.

NAB agribusiness economist Phin Ziebell said tight supply had help fuel the price rises and the price of pork in Australia was likely not to ease soon.

"Australia eats a lot of imported pork – anything without a bone," Mr Ziebell said.

Australia imports about 70 per cent of its pig meat, which is mainly bacon and boneless hams because of biosecurity regulations, according to industry body Pork Australia.

"We are quite exposed to what happens on global markets and we've seen the prices really come up worldwide since the start of the year," Mr Ziebell said.

Adding the costly pork is the weakness of the Australian dollar, which has fallen 3.4 per cent against the US currency this year.

"With the dollar coming off significantly and us increasingly importing a lot of pig meat, that will also put some upward pressure on prices, so I don't think we are going to see a big decline pork prices, at least in the Australian market, anytime soon," Mr Ziebell said.

But while pork prices aren't expected to fall this year, they aren't tipped to continue to rocket either.

Mr Ziebell said the cost of global feed prices were low, which should limit further price increases.

"The one thing that would give me pause about prices is that feed grain prices, globally, have been very low, so the price of inputs into the pork production process is not high.

"There aren't big cost pressures in the feed globally and that should in the medium-term limit to some extent how high it will go."

Pork prices also were bolstered last month following the reweighting of the two main commodity indices, Standard & Poor's GSCI and Bloomberg Commodity Index.

Chinese New Year has also kept prices high. In Singapore, average prices of the traditional caramelised pork slices known as Bak-Kwa – a popular gift and snack for the season – have surged the most in at least five years in the weeks before the festival, even when inflation has all but disappeared elsewhere.

It followed Singapore's manufacturing sector contracting, with exports suffering, and consumer prices falling for 14 straight months.

With Bloomberg