The Rural Voice, 2019-06, Page 10 On top of all the other concerns
they live with, it must be a nervous
time for Canada’s pork farmers
worrying that our country’s efforts to
prevent African swine fever (ASF)
from entering the country might fail.
Fortunately, there’s 5,000 kms. of
ocean between Canada and Europe,
where the disease has spread from
China. Still, the challenges are
enormous. In China, some backyard
pork producers have shipped sick
pigs to try to get what money they
could from them. In Taiwan, two per
cent of pork confiscated at ports
contained ASF-contaminated pork. In
the U.S., border agents who searched
50 containers arriving in New Jersey,
found a million pounds of pork
hidden among noodle bowls and Tide
detergent containers.
The federal government has
provided money to more than double
the number of detector dogs at
Canada’s airports to try to sniff out
meat products in people’s luggage
that might be infected by the disease.
The challenge is that it takes so little
of the virus to sneak through and
even a single case of the disease in a
Canadian swine herd could see other
countries close their borders to
imports of Canadian pork. Our pork
industry is so dependent on exports
that industry officials estimate an
outbreak of ASF could cost 100,000
jobs and $24 billion. That doesn’t
account for the human pain.
Many pork producers can
remember watching their beef-
producer neighbours suffer through
the BSE crisis that began in 2003. It
started with a Black Angus cow in
Alberta’s Peace River region which
had been imported from Britain
where the disease had devastated the
industry. When the cow died, its head
was sent to a lab for testing but it was
three and a half months before
officials actually did the tests and
confirmed it was infected with BSE.
By then, two other sick cattle from
the same farm had been processed for
protein for animal feed.
More than 30 countries
immediately shut their borders to
imports of Canadian beef. Many
stayed closed for most of a decade. In
the end, only a handful of cattle were
diagnosed with the disease but it’s
been estimated the cost to the
Canadian economy was from $6-$10
billion.
The human cost was high, as beef
producers found the business model
for their farms exploded overnight as
beef prices plummeted. Anyone
whose operation required a secure
cash flow found himself in trouble.
I was only a kid when the other
great disease-related economic
tsunami hit Canadian farmers. Late in
1951 a cattle beast in a feedlot
attached to a Saskatchewan packing
plant became ill, but it was
misdiagnosed. It wasn’t until
February that officials correctly
identified the illness as foot and
mouth disease. Again, borders were
slammed shut to Canadian imports.
The legend is that the infection
started when a worker threw the
remains of a sandwich containing
infected sausage meat, into a feed
bunker. By August Canada was
confirmed as disease free but still the
cost was estimated at $651 million in
losses (probably about as much as the
BSE crisis in today’s dollars) and
$70 million in support payments. I
can recall, as kids do, sensing the
tension in their air in our family as
our already precarious farm finances
took a new hit.
Thankfully, because of the bio-
security protocols they already have
in place, pork farmers are probably
better equipped than any other farm
commodity to ward off a new
infection. In fact the greatest danger
seems to be the possibility of
contaminated feed. Still, as with
BSE, it only takes one infection to
hurt every pork farmer.
It’s somewhat ironic (and
frightening) that Canadians’
prosperity can threaten the
livelihoods of farmers by allowing
diseases to hitchhike across oceans
with world travellers.◊
6 The Rural Voice
It’s a challenge to
stop new diseases
Keith is former
publisher of
The Rural
Voice.
He lives near
Blyth, ON.
Keith Roulston
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