Late last month, Ceva Animal Health hosted a successful webinar, “Maximize Your Farm Security”, in which Dr. John Carr and Avery Zeng provided their view on biosecurity, with a focus on the ASF experience in China. (More on the seminars in a future issue).
Dr. Carr, in his opening remarks to 800 swine industry representatives from six Asian countries using video teleconferencing titled his talk, “Is to raise the wall around your farm. We must put more bricks in the wall. We must control African Swine Fever. African Swine Fever is a terrible disease.”
He described ASF as raging rampant across Asia, taking increasing numbers of countries out and devastating those countries’ pig productions. The big pig production area affected is China, but it affects major pig industries in Vietnam and the Philippines in particular.
“The big issue with African Swine Fever in this area of Asia, we have over two billion people and about a 0.7 to one billion pigs. And pigs represent 80 per cent of meat protein eaten throughout Asia,” said Dr. Carr. “If we have lost half of our pigs in these major powerhouses of the pig industry, 10 per cent of the human food protein availability on this planet, this is a planetary thing, problem, not only in Asia. To replace meat protein that we’ve lost, we’re going to have to increase our chickens by 25 per cent, or our cattle by 40 per cent but neither of those two are real options.”
He said the only real option for Asia to provide healthy protein is to get the pig industry back on its feet as soon as possible.
In a separate interview for the Prairie Hog Country, Dr. Carr, the Asian pig industry is in deep trouble at the moment because something happened, with basically two days warning. There’s nothing he can do; the industry will keep producing pigs for the next year. And then, of course, the big problem is that in a year’s time people are going to say, well, where are the pigs – consumed by the people who have them.
“It takes me another year to produce the pigs again because of the problem in China; her supply line break was in mum and dad. She’s killed mum and dad so she’s got to replace the sow and the boar, get them pregnant and have baby pigs,” he said. “While the supply line chain break is early on in China, Canada and the United States supply chain broke in the slaughterhouse, fairly late in the system, but it doesn’t matter when it happens.”
Dr. Carr, who represents the Canadian pig industry in a sense because he consults to the Canadian industry, said Canada’s major customer needs and wants pork.

“We’ve got to figure out how to supply them. It’s a disaster, and sickening the pork price falls when the world demands pork. I mean, where’s the economics – we need to be shipping pork to China who’s going to go hungry,” he said. “I think African Swine Fever is more important than COVID-19. If people starve, it’ll kill many more people than COVID-19 will. And the resistance to COVID-19 is through eating healthy pork. You can quote that.”
Dr. Carr said people need to eat high-quality food to maintain their health. And keeping their health, just as it is vital to maintain the pig’s health, supporting the human being’s health is critical in controlling this virus.
When people get sick, they need to get over it quickly.
“Well, the virus is telling us one thing, if you have underlying problems, and I’ll be so bold, it’s because you don’t eat enough pork,” he said. “But if you have underlying problems, you are going to have some severe issues with COVID-19, almost no matter what age you are.”
Dr. Carr said one answer to COVID-19 is not having underlying problems, and that means we need a proper, balanced diet, with good quality food. He thinks the pig is an integral part of that food. And in Asia, the pork is 80 per cent of the meat protein. Well, if those people start eating more rice and more vegetables because that’s what’s available, they’re not eating meat protein; they’re not getting those minerals, vitamins.
“Vegans are going to argue with me. I’m a pig-man. I believe that a balanced diet includes meat. We are omnivorous.” •
— By Harry Siemens