Skyrocketing pork prices are becoming a major concern for consumers as the demand for food is surging in the lead up to the Lunar New Year, the biggest national holiday, and many other festivities. Pork supply has tumbled as the highly contagious African swine fever (ASF) has resulted in the country's pig herd contracting by one-fifth.
Skyrocketing pork prices are becoming a major concern for consumers as the demand for food is surging in the lead up to the Lunar New Year, the biggest national holiday, and many other festivities. Pork supply has tumbled as the highly contagious African swine fever (ASF) has resulted in the country’s pig herd contracting by one-fifth.
Statistics show the pig herd has plunged by 18.5%, hence a severe shortage of pork and a sharp rise in pork prices. This kind of red meat has doubled in price to some VND220,000 a kilo, or nearly US$10. In HCMC, for example, several traders joining the price stabilization program have sought permission from municipal authorities to raise pork prices to avoid losses as the live pig price has almost tripled to VND92,000 a kilo.
Especially, Dong Nai Province, the country’s biggest pig farming area, has this year seen its herd dipping by some 41%, or more than one million pigs, to 1.48 million now. Efforts to scale up pig farming have not borne fruit as the ASF virus remains an existential threat.
As widely known, the ASF virus can survive even in harsh conditions outside live pigs for six months to one year, or even longer. The virus can be found active in the air, in the soil, in animal feed or even in semi-processed meat products after long months, and cleaning up the environment to resume pig rearing has proven a tall order. To make matters worse, there is no vaccine against the virus.
In Dong Nai, among the 26 communes reportedly free of the virus where farmers are allowed to resume raising pigs, the disease has recurred in six communes, the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development said in a report last month. This is an alarm to other farmers, with most of them being now fretful about restarting the rearing business.
In the current ASF crisis, it is seen that most of the small pig farms have been wiped out, while many large-scale farms that apply stringent hygiene standards and strict supply chain norms – from breeding to feed supply to slaughtering – have been kept intact. Such experiences are valuable for the country’s husbandry sector to start restructuring pig farming.
The recommended approach should be to encourage concentrated farming, with sizeable agricultural parks to be established to accommodate tens of thousands of pigs or more each. The approach will not only help prevent the spread of the ASF virus but other contagious diseases such as foot-and-mouth and blue-ear ones. It will also help better protect the environment, since pig farming in residential neighborhoods has long prompted outcries from residents due to water pollution and offensive odor.
Since pork is an essential type of food for most local people, it is imperative to achieve sustainable pig farming, which can only be made possible with thorough restructuring. The undersupply of pork as seen in the past several months needs to be properly dealt with via a pork security program, and in that approach, sufficient local supply is vital besides pork imports for the right balance.
(Source:SGT)
