Swine flu: millions of pigs slaughtered in Asia

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), ever since the first case of African swine flu was registered in August last year in the Chinese city of Liaoning, the disease has also been found in animals in Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia, Cambodia, and North Korea.

As a result, millions of pigs are being slaughtered in China and Vietnam. According to Vietnam’s state media, about 2.8m pigs, representing about 10 percent of the herd of the Southeast Asian country, were slaughtered. The disease has spread to Vietnamese farming facilities on a large scale.

In China, the world’s largest pig producer, about 1.1m pigs were slaughtered, with officials saying cases were found in 32 areas.

According to the estimates from Rabobank in the Netherlands, one in two pigs in China will die either from contracting African swine flu or from slaughter.

Economic impact

Containment of the outbreak will not be easy. According to Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary epidemiologist at the City University of Hong Kong, “if you do not have a vaccine and have a virus that survives so well in the environment, combined with the huge density of pigs kept in low biosecurity conditions, stopping the spread of the virus is a huge challenge.”

The disease has already hit most provinces in China, reducing pork production by an estimate of 30 percent.

Millions of pigs have been slaughtered, devastating global food chains, with pork prices rising from food markets in Hong Kong to American dinner tables.

Prices of live pigs have increased by about 40 percent compared to last year in China, and pork imports from Europe, Canada, and Brazil to China are increasing.

Beef and chicken exports are also on the rise as traders struggle to fill the deficit in a region where pork is the basic protein.

This will hurt the pork industry and derived sectors such as the soybean business that is used for animal feed.

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