Pig/swine virus

A recent report from Rabobank projects half of China’s hog herd will be wiped out by African Swine Fever by 2020.  

Dan Halstrom, with the US Meat Export Federation, says China’s live hog industry is in liquidation mode and that will lead to a global pork shortage.  “Today the shortage is only on hogs,” he says.  “The freezers are pretty full, but it will be just a matter of time before they work through that.  There will be a shortage of pork protein coming out of China – which will impact the whole world.”

He tells Brownfield it will be a bullish situation for the hog market.  “We can expect a higher demand,” he says.  “And higher prices as a result of it.  But the thing nobody knows is when.”  

Rabobank also expects Vietnam’s pork production to drop by 15 to 20 percent from last year.  

African Swine Fever has also spread to other parts of Asia and has been found in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea.

Despite its illegality, and the risks of transporting dangerous diseases, thousands of people try to carry prohibited food products - and sometimes even live birds - through ports of entry every day (see Vienna: 5 Smuggled Birds Now Reported Positive For H5N1).
In 2014's `Carrion’ Luggage & Other Ways To Import Exotic Diseases we looked at the exotic bush meat trade from Africa, while more recently we've been focused on the smuggling of ASF tainted pork (see Taiwan Expands ASF Luggage Checks).
Last night Australian officials announced a particularly egregious - and dangerous - attempt by a Vietnamese woman who tried to bring 10 kg (22lbs) of raw pork, seafood, and poultry into Sydney (see Reuters report Australia bars entry to Vietnamese woman for failing to declare raw pork).

While it doesn't tend to make daily headlines, much of the world is dealing with one of the most expensive epizootics in history. African Swine Fever (ASF) has wiped out - at least by some estimates - as much as a quarter of the world's pig production.
And this aporkalypse shows no signs of slowing.
While the full extent of the damage has been deliberately obscured by China and North Korea, a recent Rabobank report (“African Swine Fever: A Global Update.”) - published August 22nd - has revised their estimates of China's losses to 50% - or over 200 million head.

TRex2 wrote:
There isn't a need to panic.
Not yet, anyways.
And prices here in the US aren't up too much.
Not yet, anyways.
I personally plan to up my stocks of pork products,
(non perishables only) over the next few weeks.

Just stopped back by, to add a link to expound on my posting:
http://afludiary.blogspot.com/2019/06/hong-kong-asf-detected-for-second-time.html

TRex2 wrote:I have been trying to figure out a solution to store some pork, long term, without refrigeration and without too much salt. (High BP runs in the family.)
I have a few of those 10 oz cans, but at $2.80 each, they get a little expensive when I start thinking about getting a hundred of them ). Plus, they are really lean and do have some salt. (45 grams protein, 5 grams fat, 225 cal and 1750 mg sodium, per can.) Unfortunately neither my wife, nor I, like spam.

Maybe I will stockpile some dehydrated pork products.

Drinkthekoolaid wrote:

TRex2 wrote:I have been trying to figure out a solution to store some pork, long term, without refrigeration and without too much salt. (High BP runs in the family.)
I have a few of those 10 oz cans, but at $2.80 each, they get a little expensive when I start thinking about getting a hundred of them ). Plus, they are really lean and do have some salt. (45 grams protein, 5 grams fat, 225 cal and 1750 mg sodium, per can.) Unfortunately neither my wife, nor I, like spam.

Maybe I will stockpile some dehydrated pork products.

Aldi sells those canned hams for about the same cost and they have a very long shelf life. I think the ones in store now expire in 2023 or something..

Off memory I think it's a 16oz canned ham for 2.89$.

U.S. authorities have started active preparations in response to the rising threat of an outbreak of African swine fever, the deadly disease that has decimated the Chinese pig population and is spreading across Asia.

The Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service led several functional exercises and drills late last month, working off a scenario of an outbreak of the virus in Mississippi that traveled across state lines before it was discovered. Fourteen states participated in the drill.

ReadyMom wrote:So, thinking ahead ... Easter may just be lasagna instead of our usual lasagna & ham!  

The plunge in hog numbers in China, the world’s biggest pork producer and consumer, will probably bottom out before the end of the year because of government policies to combat African swine fever, an agricultural ministry official said.

Pig inventories in the country will gradually increase and market supply will return to normal in 2020, Yang Zhenhai, director of the animal husbandry and veterinary bureau at the ministry, told a briefing in Beijing on Thursday.

China has the world’s largest pig herd, or about half of the world’s total, estimated at 442 million in 2017. Many of them – about 40% - are raised in small farms with weak hygiene standards. There are still relatively few integrated producers, with most farmers relying on other people in a long supply chain to get their pigs to slaughter, often far away from their farms.
...
First detected in Kenya in 1909, African swine fever spread from Africa to Europe and parts of the Americas in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, before being largely eradicated except in Sardinia, Italy, where it has been endemic since 1978.

In 2007, the virus spread to Georgia and into Russia and Eastern Europe. It is now endemic in regions of the Russian Federation, where domestic pigs and wild boar populations are widely affected.

The first outbreak in Asia was reported in Shenyang, northeastern China, in August 2018. Nowhere in the world has it spread faster and across such a wide area than in China.

About half of the country's 433 million pigs are at risk.
By Mustika Hapsoro  18 April 2019, 11:49pm

China’s pork crisis is bigger than you think
By Tanner Brown  Nov 16, 2019 2:57 p.m

Ag Trade: African Swine Fever Roils Markets, Food Price Concerns
December 10, 2019
By Keith Good, Farm Policy News

Bloomberg News reported last week that, “China’s hog population has stopped shrinking and is starting to rise, after months of decline because of African swine fever, and the recovery should keep pork prices in check, a senior agriculture ministry official said.

“Pig herds probably began to pick up in November after 12 provinces, including Henan, Shandong and Jilin, reported an increase in inventories, said Yang Zhenhai, head of the ministry’s animal husbandry bureau. The declines in some provinces in the south and southwest have also eased. ‘Overall, breeding sow inventories are expanding and we see a bottoming in hog inventories.’”

The Bloomberg article added that, “China’s wholesale pork prices have dropped for a fourth straight week from a record level, taking the decline from the start of November to almost 20%. Inflation hit a seven-year high in October on the back on rising pork prices.”

The increasing demand for recombinant vaccine, DNA vaccines and multivalent vaccines is expected to aid the growth of the global livestock vaccines market. The outbreak disease around the world is expected to uplift the global livestock vaccines market shares during the forecast period. For instance, the outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) disease affected roughly millions of pigs in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other south-east Asian countries in 2018, and Mycoplasma bovis infections among cattle in 2018, in New Zealand. Furthermore, the increasing government initiatives to prevent the spread of zoonotic diseases is expected to further augment the growth of the global livestock vaccines market.

Hog farms found using illegal vaccines will be punished under China’s intensified efforts to arrest its African swine fever crisis.

Homemade, experimental and imported vaccines against the pig-killing virus are prohibited, and risk untold biosafety hazards for the world’s largest pork industry, Yang Zhenhai, head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ animal husbandry bureau, told reporters in Beijing on Friday.

“Farms that use these vaccines won’t be able to effectively prevent the disease and they could spread it further -- something we take seriously,” Yang said. The ministry will punish those who use, produce or sell these products, he said. Those found guilty may be liable for fines of as much as 200,000 yuan ($28,500).