The coronavirus outbreak that is raging all over China right now has been making headlines on a daily basis all over the globe, and rightly so. At this point we don’t know if it will ultimately become a horrifying global pandemic that will affect tens of millions of people, but what we do know is that the virus spreads very easily and the number of cases has been rising at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, three other plagues have also been marching across Asia, and most people in the western world don’t even realize that this is happening. What I am about to share with you in this article is quite chilling, and the months ahead will be very dark if these plagues continue to spread.
Long before we ever heard of this new coronavirus, African Swine Fever was devastating pork farms from one end of China to the other. There is no vaccine for “pig ebola”, there is no cure, and once it hits a farm the only thing that can be done is to kill every single pig so that it won’t spread anywhere else. But even though draconian measures have been implemented, it has just kept spreading, and at this point “about two-thirds of China’s swine herd has been lost”…
Video of people fighting over pork at Chinese meat counters will likely become more common as the fallout from the African swine fever outbreak in China progresses.
Brett Stuart, president of the market research and analysis firm Global AgriTrends, estimates that about two-thirds of China’s swine herd has been lost to the disease and contrary to official government reports of recovery, more pigs are dying every day as ASF continues to spread.
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African Swine Fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the world, and this threatens to create a crippling global shortage of protein as we head into 2020. This epidemic began in China last year, and it is now also running wild in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines. But this crisis is certainly not limited to Asia. According to the Washington Post, so far in 2019 there have also been outbreaks “in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.” Overall, cases of African Swine Fever have been documented “in nearly 50 nations”, and U.S. pork producers are extremely concerned that it could start spreading here too.
African Swine Fever is extremely contagious, there is no vaccine, and there is no cure. Once it starts spreading in a certain area, there isn’t much that can be done “other than culling herds and loading carcasses into hazardous waste sites”. Literally, we are talking about an unstoppable global plague that is an existential threat to our food supply. Of course many of us don’t eat pork, but there will also be an immense strain on supplies of beef and chicken as those that eat pork are forced to turn to other alternatives. This is an exceedingly serious situation, and with each month it is just getting worse.
China is the epicenter for this crisis, and CNN is reporting that the Chinese herd has “shrunk by around 130 million” since this epidemic first began last year…
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With Chinese pigs getting slaughtering left and right to contain the breakout of African swine fever, also known as “Pig Ebola”, so are pork shorts as meat processors around the world scramble to sell more pork to China to make up for sharp shortages of China’s most popular protein. The consequence is tighter supplies in the U.S. and Europe, which is pushing up prices. And as the disease continues to spread throughout China – the world’s largest producer and consumer – the trend will only get worse.
Case in point: US retail prices for boneless hams hit $4.31 per pound in March, the highest since 2015.
But none of this compares to what is about to hit China, where consumers are bracing for a shock as pork prices may surge more than 70% in the second half of this year an agriculture ministry official said last month, as the country’s pork output has plunged as much as 30% this year, according to Rabobank, and could spike Chinese CPI in the coming months, sharply limiting the PBOC’s efforts to stimulate and boost liquidity in the world’s (credit-driven) growth dynamo and curbing China’s latest attempt to reflate the world and boost global economic growth.
“Some meat that used to go to the U.S. is now going to China because it pays more,” Jens Munk Ebbesen, director of food safety and veterinary issues at the Danish Agriculture & Food Council recently told Bloomberg.
Seeking to frontrun some of the price surge, China recently made its biggest-ever weekly purchase of US pork:
“African swine fever has sparked a rally across global protein stocks, but it’s not too late to buy in,” Morgan Stanley analysts led by Rafael Shin said in an April report to clients this week.“We think the rally has only begun and that the long-term impacts of ASF are still not understood.”
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An absolutely devastating disease is wiping out herds of pigs all over Asia, and most people in the western world don’t even realize what is happening. Since it was first detected last August, there have been 116 officially reported outbreaks of African Swine Fever in China, and since that time it has rapidly spread to surrounding nations such as Cambodia and Vietnam. African Swine Fever is not harmful to humans, but the vast majority of the pigs that catch it end up dead. It spreads very quickly and there is no cure, and this outbreak has already driven global pork prices through the roof. If this crisis continues to escalate, we are potentially talking about a crippling blow to global food production.
China raises and consumes far more pigs than anyone else in the world, and it is also the epicenter of this crisis.
At this point we don’t know exactly how many pigs that they have lost, but we have some numbers that at least give us an idea. For example, the Chinese government admitted that China’s pig herd was 13 percent smaller in January compared to a year earlier…
China’s pig herd fell 13 percent in January compared with the same month a year earlier, while the number of breeding sows was down 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
China once had a population of 430 million pigs, and taking 13 percent of that number would give us a total of 55.9 million pigs that have been lost.
But there have also been allegations of a “cover-up”, and some believe that the true number of pigs that have been lost is closer to 100 million.
In either case, we are talking about potentially apocalyptic losses.
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A series of African Swine Fever outbreaks in China is “here to stay,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Friday, adding that it could spread to neighboring countries in Asia.
On Wednesday, the FAO assembled an emergency meeting in Bangkok consisting of health experts, government officials, and industry participants from China and surrounding countries to develop a regional response to east Asia’s first outbreak of the disease.
While the virus is not a direct threat to humans, it is extremely contagious and has a high mortality rate among pigs, and can have a devastating economic impact on meat producers.
“It’s critical that this region be ready for the very real possibility that African Swine Fever could jump the border into other countries,” said Wantanee Kalpravidh, regional manager in Asia for the FAO’s Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases. “That’s why this emergency meeting has been convened.”
Reuters said the virus was first detected in China last month and has been found in 18 farms with many cases more than 600 miles apart, the FAO said in a statement.
With an abundance of pork farms across China, the FAO indicated the spread of the virus to neighboring countries is almost inevitable.
“The geographical spread, of which African Swine Fever has been repeated in such a short period of time, means that transboundary emergence of the virus, likely through movements of products containing infected pork, will almost certainly occur,” said Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer at FAO.
The response to the disease is “extremely challenging” because the virus can survive for months in meat products and animal feed, said the FAO.
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Olduvai IV: Courage
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