How FADs have affected foreign markets

Since the middle of the 20th century, numerous foreign animal disease (FAD) outbreaks involving the pork industry have been recorded throughout the world:

• In 1967, 2001 and 2007, the United Kingdom experienced outbreaks of foot-and-month disease (FMD), and in the early part of this century, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Bulgaria and China also faced outbreaks.
• Classical swine fever is endemic in Africa, parts of Asia and Central and South America.
• For several decades, African swine fever (ASF) was largely confined to the African continent and the Italian island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean. It was also found in Portugal in the late 1950s.
• In 2007, ASF was introduced into the Caucasus region of Eurasia through the Republic of Georgia and has since spread to both domesticated pigs and wild boars in a number of countries in this region, according to Iowa State University’s Center for Food Security and Public Health. More recently, it has been found in China and Belgium.

The economic impact of the recent FAD outbreaks has been instructive for the US pork industry.

• One study showed that an FMD outbreak in 2001 in the United Kingdom resulted in 6.5 million animals being culled. The epidemic cost to that country ranged from $12.3 billion to $13.8 billion, according to published reports.

• More recently in China, stocks of top pork-producing companies dropped shortly after reports of ASF. Japan closed access to heat-treated pork-product imports from China as well as other products such as heat-treated rice straw used for bedding. One region of China that has been hit hard by ASF ordered the temporary closure of all live-hog markets and slaughterhouses where the outbreak was discovered.

See Part 1 of this special report  FAD outbreak could cost US agriculture $200 billion over 10 years

See Part 2 of this special report  A question of when: How the US pork industry is preparing for a possible FAD outbreak