African Swine Fever National Strategy Focusses on Minimizing Negative Impact of ASF Outbreak

The Chief Veterinarian with the National Pork Producers Council says, in the event of an African Swine Fever outbreak, the ability to identify where the disease is and to resume the movement pigs and pork from non-diseased area will be critical.
The National Pork Producers Council in partnership with the National Pork Board has developed an African Swine Fever national strategy.
NPPC Chief Veterinarian Dr. Liz Wagstrom points out, in the event of an outbreak, all hog movements within the United States would immediately be stopped for 72 hours and trade would shut down.

Clip-Dr. Liz Wagstrom-National Pork Producers Council:
In the strategy we have six priorities.
We talk about needing to harmonize state and federal plans.
We have a lot of producers that work across state lines and we need consistency to be able to harmonize and know what we need to do in each state to be able to continue to grow pigs and move pigs.
The next one is to make sure producers have clear information of what can be expected of them.
The third one is to work with USDA to maximize our surveillance efforts so that we would have the best chance of identifying the first case of African Swine Fever as early as possible.
Our fourth one is we have been working on a pilot of the U.S. Swine Health Improvement Project.
It's modelled after the National Poultry Improvement Program and we want to make sure that it becomes an official USDA program with USDA funding of course.
The fifth priority is to make sure, if we have an outbreak, that producers will receive fair indemnity and also look at market support programs and the final one is be prepared to get back into trade as quickly as possible.

Dr. Wagstrom says adding an extra 27 to 30 percent more pork onto the domestic market because it can't be traded will put incredible downward pressure on prices so having the discussions ahead of time with trading partners aimed at getting them to accept product from areas free of the infection will be key.