China’s swine flu is no surprise if you have seen how their pigs are treated
When China ushered in the Year of the Pig in February, the country’s benighted pig population could hardly have known that its eponymous year would in fact herald a porcine catastrophe. African swine flu has swept across the Middle Kingdom at such speed that it’s thought nearly half of the country’s usual stock of 430 million pigs will have to be culled before the year is out.
Beijing is apparently not recording all the outbreaks suspected to be ongoing, but the authorities are at least encouraging farmers to come forward by giving them a payment for each pig culled, to discourage hiding the disease. After all, it would be difficult, not to mention dangerous, to suppress news of a crisis that has pushed up the cost of the meat by nearly a fifth.
African swine flu isn’t new, nor is it harmful to humans. But it is extremely harmful to Chinese appetites, especially at a time when Beijing’s participation in a trade war has introduced steep tariffs
on American pork and when disputes over Huawei could freeze out Canadian and Australian alternatives. The country could well turn to India and Germany, already a big supplier of pig offal, and given China’s size, we should probably all prepare for a price surge.
Unfortunately, the epidemic isn’t surprising. Of all the places I’ve visited, I have never seen animals treated worse than in China. I remember seeing pigs crammed so tightly into a multi-tiered cage on the back of a truck that limbs were poking through the bars. And I still shudder at the memory of visiting a food market in the south, where a woman was casually snapping apart live prawns, tossing the meaty tail onto
Given the country’s size, we should probably prepare for a pork price surge
one pile and chucking the still-wriggling head and legs onto another, writhing mass of half-living “waste”.
Admittedly, that was six years ago. Perhaps things have changed, though I doubt it. One has to hope, at least, that disease outbreaks aren’t just a trigger to flood livestock with drugs and bleach, as the US does, but to consider whether paying a little more to maintain decent conditions might be worth it to avoid the cost and horror of a crisis like this.