To make things much more difficult, the new African swine fever strain is hard to spot. This new mutant strain is believed to be the result of gene deletions, which are typical of antiviral vaccines. The trouble is that it also means pigs have been illegally vaccinated, hence the extremely high risk from this new version of swine fever.
Global reports indicate various levels of African swine fever outbreaks worldwide. This disease is highly contagious, and caused massive culls of pigs in recent years.
Pig stats and problems
• The current number of live pigs imported is around 75 million worldwide.
• The global pork import trade was about $32 billion in 2019.
• Pork is a major food supply source, with about 36% of meat consumed worldwide. To give a comparison, beef accounts for 24% and poultry 33%.
• Pork is famously the traditional cheap meat, accessible worldwide for lower-income groups.
This means that a major hit to the pork market would put severe pressure on other meat supplies. There are about 500 million live pigs in the market worldwide every year. Add to this the slash-and-burn effects of illegal fishing, and the world’s overall animal protein supply isn’t looking good.
Illegal vaccinations reduce the possibilities of easy control. If pigs are receiving “bootleg” vaccinations, the supply chain is in big trouble:
• Whoever’s using unproven vaccines must be incredibly, astonishingly, stupid. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about agricultural vaccines would know better. Animal pandemics are worse than human pandemics and can crash populations quickly due to the production monocultures which cram lots of vulnerable animals together.
• There’s apparently no hard information on who, what, where and when the supposed illegal vaccinations occurred.
• The illegal vaccinations obviously slipped under the regulation radar. Therefore they must have gained access to the global market, probably sourced through criminal groups.
• There’s no realistic way of tracing the illegal vaccines and stopping their circulation. That is, unless law enforcement gets incredibly lucky with finding the sources, and global governments take a very uncharacteristic interest in stopping organized crime for once in their miserable lives.
Let’s hope the world is a bit more competent at handling African swine fever than it is with COVID, or meat is likely to get very expensive.
