A Vicious Disease Is Wiping Out China’s Pig Population
It’s estimated that African swine fever could kill half of China’s pigs by the end of 2019
Of all the 900 million pigs being raised on farms around the world today, more than 400 million are in China. Pork is so central to the Chinese diet — especially as the country has grown wealthier — that menus there often list pork as simply “meat,” and the amount of pork eaten in China exceeds all the meat Americans consume annually. Now, a global epidemic called African swine fever (ASF) is wreaking havoc in China — the country that produces and consumes the most pork in the world.
“I have never seen anything that kills animals on the scale of this disease,” says Edgar Wayne Johnson, a veterinarian based in Beijing who consults for farmers and runs a diagnostics lab that detects such outbreaks. The Dutch financial services company Rabobank estimates that as many as 200 million pigs will die in China as a result of the disease or culling efforts. Official reports indicate that 22% of female pigs have died in the latest outbreak, but some experts, including Johnson, say the real figures must be higher. Johnson says he has personally witnessed a farm of 7,000 pigs, all of which were sick, dying or already dead.
