Battling the African swine flu epidemic

Overall, the past year was marked by circumstances too extraordinary to discount, tilling Philippine agriculture to its topsy-turvy performance. Compared to the country’s overall economic performance, though, agriculture still managed to sprout a few gems.

Should this year turn out to be less than extraordinary, nursing productivity up to 2.5 percent this year may yet be attainable, and would help ramp up the country’s projected gross domestic product growth for 2021 of between 7.5 and 8.5 percent.

It’s unfortunate that the Department of Agriculture (DA) could not manage to control the spread of the African swine fever (ASF) in Central Luzon, something that greatly contributed to the livestock sector’s 12.9 percent drop in production value during the fourth quarter.

The resulting scarcity in pork sent prices soaring last month to a top price of P400 per kilo, a shocking jump from the normal P225 that we have lived with for quite some time now. With poultry prices also rising, this created some public clamor for action.

A different epidemic

The deadly and highly contagious ASF is a scary flu, having no known vaccine available for widespread use until now. Big hog–consuming countries like China, where the ASF wiped out about half of its hog herd in 2018, have mounted their own measures to normalize production.

The Philippines has not experienced the scale that China had with regards ASF, but the disruption wrought by the latest flu outbreak in Luzon should galvanize the DA into acting quickly in institutionalizing measures to contain livestock and poultry diseases.

Last year, the livestock industry had to cull about half a million hogs in an effort to stop the spread of the ASF. Repopulation has been slow, and this will likely impact on the continued short supply and high price of pork in the market well into the second quarter, unless tariff restrictions on importations are eased.

While more imports is a sure way of easing the scarcity of pork in the market and its corresponding stable price disruption, discussions on how to deal with the crisis have created its own interesting story. The DA Secretary is being asked to resign; there’s an endless debate and finger pointing on how, why, and who is responsible for the ASF spread; and recently, a call to boycott the buying and eating of pork.

The latter could be a tall order for a country that’s chalked as the world’s 10th largest pork consumer and the seventh biggest pork importer ever since the DA declared the ASF outbreak.

For sure, the DA needs to come up with a plan that should tackle this problem, something that seems to be a growing global concern that threatens to disrupt current food supply chains more than what the coronavirus pandemic has caused.

Not only is pork at risk, but also poultry – and to a limited extent, beef. Filipinos have learned through the decades to love animal meat, and this can contribute to the lively play between supply and demand in a consumer market that just cannot live with vegetables for their meals.

Even fish has become vulnerable, not too much from red tides and similar infestations, but because of increasing severity of typhoons that damaged coasts where large swathes of fishing communities reside, preventing fishing folks from casting their nets.

Infection spread controls

One interesting discussion that has resurfaced is the DA plan to set up border controls, not so much on the inter-island movement of livestock and poultry, but from those coming from outside the country. As with most pandemics these days, governments are getting paranoid about contagion coming from other countries.

The construction of a quarantine facility for animal meat products in the country’s key ports has been in blueprint stage for years now, unable to move forward despite the Food Safety Act of 2013 requiring all imported foods to undergo cargo inspection and clearance by the DA and the Department of Health (DOH).

This plan should be thoroughly reviewed, not just because of the cost, but because of the urgency of paying attention to other pressing matters that may have more significance in putting an end to the ASF epidemic, which now seems to be out of control.

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s manual on the control and eradication of ASF pretty much details how serious this virus is, and reflects on what our government needs to do if it wants to stamp out completely the spread that started in August 2019 in a few towns in Rizal and Bulacan.

Seeing how the first new cases became an outbreak in just a month only underscores the need for a more comprehensive plan on how to deal with the ASF epidemic. The P85.3-billion livestock industry, including the livelihood of thousands of backyard growers, is at risk at a most vulnerable time.

Comprehensive measures are needed, including setting up of buffer zones, deep burial sites for carcasses, disinfection and decontamination where an infection has been identified, a cold storage system to ramp up pork stocks, and opening up of credit lines to help affected hog raisers to restock.

The industry is looking at the DA to lead the way, and is even looking forward to future measures like the ongoing development of an ASF rapid test kit that will allow commercial hog raisers to detect early the presence of the deadly virus. Let’s hope that all these come to fore.

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