Pigs have already succumbed to the disease in Vietnam and Cambodia. Thailand fears it could be next
THERE ARE few dishes that a typical Filipino, Thai or Vietnamese would not consider improved by the addition of pork. What better to stuff a squid with, or garnish a bowl of steaming noodles or simply spit-roast and scoff? No wonder, then, that South-East Asia is home to more than 83m pigs. But the outbreak of African swine fever that has swept through China in recent months is now spreading across the region.
Swine fever first crossed the border from China into Vietnam in February. It has gradually worked its way south, and in April spread to Cambodia . Thailand fears it is next. In fact, the disease could already be there or elsewhere: experts worry that monitoring and reporting are patchy.Pigs catch the disease from each other, from contaminated surfaces, from ticks and from food . There is also a risk that farmed pigs may be infected by wild ones and vice versa.
Culling swine is one of the main ways officials hope to curb the disease. Vietnam has slaughtered 2.5m pigs, twice as many as China. Bans on the import of pigs and pork are another tactic. But many of the region’s pig farms are tiny, as in China. Their owners cannot afford to erect special fencing or buy commercial feed. The temptation, if they suspect their pigs are infected, is to kill or sell them quickly and quietly, to save themselves from financial ruin.
Fortunately, international co-ordination, especially between governments and companies in South-East Asia’s pork industry, has been impressive, says Wantanee Kalpravidh of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN agency. She lauds a scheme to send Thai pork to Cambodia to meet demand at affordable prices—on carefully cleaned and monitored vehicles—to discourage the smuggling of possibly contaminated meat from Vietnam.
Despite such efforts, the scale of the porcine plague in China means that South-East Asia will probably struggle with it for as long as its neighbour does. A working vaccine is still a long way off. It is hard to see what can save the region’s bacon.
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