In a time when every country is seeking to advance its market and workforce, the question of how to feed populations continues to appear. As an industry dedicated to real pork for real people, pork has an important role to play across the globe in bringing protein to populations looking to develop industry on the global stage.
ASF’s Attack on Protein
One of the main places where global food security and pork combine is in the continued efforts to fight African Swine Fever (ASF). ASF, first discovered around 1920, is a disease originating from ticks found on wild pigs. When infected, a swine suffers a hemorrhagic fever, and while a vaccine has been developed against the virus, there is no known cure for its symptoms that have a nearly 100% fatality rate. ASF has been found in countries across Europe, Africa, Central America, and Asia, which are all fighting to eliminate the disease.
The impact of ASF has been devastating for many reasons, emotional, economic, and otherwise, but it has hit East Asia particularly harshly due to a cultural reliance on pork in many dishes native to the area. The 2018 emergence of the virus in the area is credited with killing roughly half of China’s swine population before spreading further into East Asian countries such as Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. It’s no surprise that China, with its enormous population, has especially struggled with feeding its people as a result.
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