USA farmers warned: Don’t take your eyes off of ASF

Source: Jennifer Shike, Farm Journal’s Pork, 3 June 2020, photo credit: National Pork Board and the Pork Checkoff/Farm Journal’s Pork

Foreign animal disease prevention and preparedness have not gone away even though they appear to have taken a backseat to the pandemic. If anything, the COVID-19 crisis is teaching the pork industry a hard lesson about disease outbreaks: more work is needed.

“One of the key things we’ve learned is that the U.S. was not fully prepared for a foreign animal disease outbreak,” says Bill Even, CEO of the National Pork Board. “We had a number of the plans in place, but we found we didn’t probably have all the necessary equipment, or understanding logistically, of how you execute such a plan in an emergency.”
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The South African Pork Producers’ Organisation (SAPPO) coordinates industry interventions and collaboratively manages risks in the value chain to enable the sustainability and profitability of pork producers in South Africa.