Bulgarian veterinary authorities said on Friday they will cull 30,000 pigs after detecting an outbreak of African swine fever at a breeding farm in northern Bulgaria, the third industrial farm hit by the fast-spreading deadly virus.
Brazilian soy exports to China will definitely decline this year as African swine fever in the world’s No. 2 economy cuts demand for the animal feed, but potential growth in meat exports would offset this, Brazil’s agriculture minister said on Monday.
Brazil is in a position to step up pork exports to China where an African swine fever outbreak has become a “transformational event” for the global meat industry, Pedro Parente, chief executive of Brazilian food processor BRF SA, said on Wednesday.
Denmark has started building a 70km fence along its border with Germany in an effort to control the migration of wild boar. There are fears that African swine fever, which has been found in two dead wild boars in Belgium, could threaten Denmark's huge pig industry. If the disease spreads, it could jeopardize almost US$ 1.7bn in pork-product exports from Denmark.
China which is home to the world’s largest pig herd, reported its fourth outbreak of the deadly African swine fever on Thursday, with more than 400 pigs infected as the disease entered a fourth province, fanning worries about its rapid spread. The infection killed 340 hogs on three farms in the coastal city of Wenzhou in eastern Zhejiang province, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement.
According to official data from Moscow veterinary services, for the first nine months of 2012, in total 500,000 pigs were slaughtered in order to stop the spread of African Swine Fever (ASF) in Russia.
Following the first-ever detection of African swine fever (ASF)in Ukraine, the United Nations is warning that while control measures appear to have temporarily halted the disease's spread, it has established a firm foothold in the Caucasus and poses an ongoing risk to neighbouring areas.
A state of emergency has been imposed in a district in the Krasnodar Region in south Russia amid a major out-break of the African swine fever, the regional emergencies centre announced Sunday.