Page 4 - Australian Pork Newspaper

Cant
Comment
by BRENDON CANT
ASF has already caused some Chinese to ponder if pork dishes should be put away.
DAVID Dodwell recent- ly wrote poignantly in the South China Morn- ing Post about the far- reaching impact of Afri- can swine fever.
Given his masthead, he focused on China, but also on its global reach and impact.
David typically re- searches and writes of global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong viewpoint.
Anyway, here’s a little of what he had to ‘say’ in a South China Morning Post print edition under the headline ‘More than just the pigs’.
I found it interesting.
I hope you do. “Officials admit it (ASF)
has now reached virtually every province.
Han Changfu, minister of agriculture and rural affairs, says there is “a
complicated and grim situation”.
There are also reports it has spread into Cambo- dia, Laos, Vietnam, Thai- land and Myanmar.
Media reports say around one million pigs have been slaughtered so far.
With a countrywide population of around 433 million pigs (which pro- duce over 700 million pigs for slaughter every
year), most expert sourc- es predict an even more massive culling to come.
The farm-centred Ra- bobank predicts that Chi- na’s pork output is likely to fall by 20 percent to 30 percent over 2019, with herds being cut by up to 40 percent.
This fall will not just be due to mass culling.
With officials anxious to isolate outbreaks and pig farmers unable to get pigs to market, many are expected to abandon pig breeding.
One farmer was quoted as saying he planned to move over to growing strawberries.
Meanwhile, Rabobank says there is likely to be a nationwide shortage of pork products amounting to around four million tonnes – almost one-tenth of China’s annual con- sumption.
Instructions to “let them eat strawberries” will not be swallowed very well.
Given the size of China’s pig farming sector, it is perhaps surprising that African swine fever has not arrived earlier.
First recorded around 1907 in Kenya, it has been endemic to Africa for over a century, spread by soft ticks through local popu- lations of warthogs, wild boar and bush pigs, which carry the virus, but suffer no symptoms.
Swine fever was record- ed as spreading to Lisbon in 1957 and is now en- demic across Europe, in particular across the for- mer Soviet economies in eastern Europe (135,000 pigs were culled in Roma- nia last year).
For pigs, the virus is grim and normally fatal.
Within days of develop- ing a high fever, the skin goes purplish.
There is discharge from the eyes and nose and bloody diarrhoea.
They die within days.
Mercifully, the virus has yet to find a way of leap- ing across into humans.
While we might think we are lucky that this global pig pandemic has not yet morphed into a long-expected human pandemic, the catastroph- ic economic implications of African swine fever still loom large.
Pork is the world’s most widely consumed land- based protein source.
We slaughter about one billion pigs a year – about 23 million a week – with China, the EU and the US accounting for 85 percent.
We slaughter more chickens (about 60 billion a year) but they do not add up to the same volume of meat as comes from pigs.
We slaughter around 300 million cows a year, and even though they pro- duce more meat per cow, pigs still provide more meat in total.
The fever is hard to wipe out because it lives on for so long in pork products (it can live for one month in salami, 140 days in cured Iberian pork and almost 400 days in Parma ham), and because pigs are carried such long distances to capture coun- trywide price differences.
So for the coming two years at least, we can ex- pect a sharp fall in do- mestic Chinese produc- tion, significant increases in pork imports (Brazil is likely to be a huge benefi- ciary) and price hikes for all meat products as un- satisfied demand for pork switches across to poultry and beef.
The story for global food security is likely to be so- bering, as industrial farm- ing concentrates reliance on a dwindling range of protein sources and a ris- ing world population cre- ates a relentless pressure to supply more meat.
We should give a thought to the debt we owe the pigs that have become our industrial commodities, and recognise the dangers we have created for our- selves in engineering our food in this way.”
Feeding strawberries to pigs
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Page 4 – Australian Pork Newspaper, May 2019
www.porknews.com.au
China’s human population of around 1.42 billion love their pork, but with their pig population of around 430 million going ‘off the rails’ due to ASF, there could well be a realignment of eating habits.