The outbreak of swine fever in the Chinese pig herd, first reported last August, continues to spread and there appears to be no sign of it being brought under control.

Bord Bia’s China office says that the Chinese authorities are accepting that the situation is “very grave” with the disease now having spread to the Sichuan province, a huge pig production area in China. The disease has also been found in a wild boar which means that it is outside the controlled environment of farmed pig herds and, in further bad news, contaminated pig feed has been found in one of China’s largest feed producers.

With the outbreak not yet brought under control in China or any prospect of it in the short term, the implications for the Chinese pig herd, which accounts for over half of all pigs in the world, are grave. Pigmeat is the meat of choice in China and any scarcity of domestic supply presents an opportunity to exporters, however unfortunate the circumstances.

Ireland is in a good position to increase its business in China as it is already our second most important market for pigmeat exports. It will be the same for the other big exporting countries from the EU and, therefore, there should be good demand for pigmeat produced in Ireland and across the EU going into 2019.

Global concern

This outbreak of swine fever in the Chinese herd is not just a problem for China. With the rapid spread of disease from north to south in China, the likelihood is that it has also spread into neighbouring countries where there are little or no resources to tackle the problem.

The fear is that as there is no clear path to containing the spread of the disease in the absence of a vaccine. There is no way to tell how widespread the outbreak could become across the globe.