By Alessandro Comunian
Tutor: Paulo Lima
Translation from Italian by Giorgia Zappa
Even in Spain, what seems to be the biggest nightmare for every pig breeder over the past 10 years or so, has arrived: the African Swine Fever. Between culls, exportations bans and contradictions, the epidemic tells more than just a simple health emergency. What is the real cost of meat?
The virus and its consequences
In the Catalan territory, in Spain, between the woods of the outskirts of Barcelona, the first case of a virus that left no trace since 1994, was recorded. Last November, precisely on the 27th, a wild boar carcass, confirmed as infected, was found among the paths of the Autonomous University of Barcelona Park in Bellaterra. It was probably infected following the ingestion of contaminated food.
From there, the alarm has been triggered in all Spanish territory, not just to contain the epidemic, but also to try to eradicate it and avoid useless and other losses. The Catalan Government’s efforts were partly successful. Even if the virus has remained confined inside the delimited territory, its circulation has not been completely stopped and has already had significant consequences on the country’s economy. In less than a month, the number of infected wild animals rose to 47, and the events have caused a temporary export ban of different pig products through approximately 40 countries, including Mexico and China, two of the main clients in the supply chain.
The Catalonian government has already given the green light to a package of immediate measures to face the impact of the illness, declaring a state of emergency. And, considering that Spain represents the biggest producer of pig meat in the EU, with exports that, just in 2024, have reached a value of 8.8 billion euros, the economic repercussions are enormous.
But the human, and environmental ones, could be even more.
A crisis sweeping across Europe
Swine fever is a viral and highly contagious illness that affects exclusively domestic pigs and wild boars. The transmission of the virus can happen through direct contact between infected animals, or even in an indirect way through objects, transports, animal feed or contaminated food waste, as in the case in question.
Even if the illness is not, in any way, transmissible to humans, the health and economical consequences reveal to be extremely serious. There are no widely available vaccines or cures: the management of the outbreaks is based only on containment measures, preventive culling and restrictions on the movement of animals. The combination of these factors contributes to transforming every outbreak in a systemic crisis, able to put under pressure entire production chains throughout Europe.
Spain is, in fact, only the latest case of what seems to be a real scourge of our continent. Before in the Baltics and Poland, where in 2024, the introduction of the virus could have been helped by the circulation of contaminated food waste coming from Africa. Between 2016 and 2018, the illness kept spreading, reaching Moldova, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Belgium. Between 2019 and 2020, the diffusion has arrived in Serbia; Greece and Germany, with consequences that brought thousands of workers, throughout the entire supply chain, to their knees.
The wound is still open when we talk about our own country, Italy, where less than a year ago the swine fever overwhelmed an entire sector, paralysing it. Despite the virus being present in Sardinia for decades, in January 2022, it reached continental land for the first time, introducing itself with a strength that forced the breeders to face, not only the stop of activities and the uncertainty about the future, but also with a frightening number of culls. As declared by Coldiretti, in the most affected regions, such as Liguria, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna and Lombardy, more than one hundred thousand pigs have been taken down.
An estimate, alarming by itself, but it is just a small part of the more than 1.5 billion of pigs slaughtered in Europe since 2022, or the more than 200 million slaughtered in China following the epidemic of 2018. China is the biggest producer of pig meat in the world.
Behind excellence: the shadows of the supply chain
Despite the clear damage to the production facilities and to the breeders, the critical issues of a phenomenon of this magnitude go far beyond the economic boundaries. When it comes to breedings, there is another important key factor that, far too often, is ignored: animal welfare. If culling is a questionable practice even when considered a necessity in health emergency situations, then when the ways in which it is executed violate the main recommendation regarding animal welfare, the problem is no longer about the health emergency, but the production model itself.
The 2024 investigation of the Report, “The virus and the enemy in one’s home”, succeeded in bringing to light some of the critical issues related to the meat industry. It discussed the strategies for the “restriction” of the infection and the methods of slaughter adopted for managing the epidemic. Among these, the use of electrocution, a practice that can extend the animal’s suffering by not guaranteeing immediate death, as well as abuse, the presence of rodents and insects, carcasses left in housing areas, failure to collect faeces and inadequate controls. Breeding facilities are being abandoned in a degraded state, where animals are forced to live, or rather die, between stifling spaces and unhealthy conditions.
The irregularities and negligence that clearly expand beyond the moments of crisis and which represent just the tip of the iceberg of a sector where abuse towards non-human-life is on the agenda. In this way, the elusive standards of excellence, quality and control that every producer claims to respect, are betrayed in the name of production logic based on volume and cost reduction. Even the products coming from more renowned supply chains, such as the DOP of Prosciutto di Parma, are largely produced in the same intensive breeding facilities involved in the health crisis and in the recently emerged scandals.
Consequently, the contrast between the final product’s reassuring and handcrafted image and the real conditions of the supply chains, are, as for today, more obvious. What emerges is not just a communicative contradiction, but a structural divide between what the system says about itself, and what actually happens on a daily basis in production facilities.
An increasingly intensified and more problematic industry
Swine fever, in this sense, does not destroy the breeding industrial model, but it shows its limits, bringing to the surface fragilities that were already there even before the health emergency. The typical high concentration of animals in intensive breedings promotes the rapid circulation of pathogens, drastically reducing the difference between an isolated case and a widespread outbreak. In these environments, where thousands of animals share restricted spaces, air, surfaces and forced biological rhythms, the illness finds the perfect conditions to spread, adapt and persist.
If we analyse the recently involved countries, it is clear how the common denominator capable of making a virus harmless to humans so relevant is the meat industry. The Jamón Ibérico in Spain, the Parma ham in Emilia, and then salami, salamini, porchetta and sausages: pork is always present in our homes, sometimes, more than it should.
To meet the huge demand driven by contemporary diets and to ensure increasing volumes at low cost, the supply chain has been progressively pushed towards high concentrated breeding models, characterized by unsustainable production rhythms. A process that ended up compromising not just the quality of the final product, but also the work conditions and the welfare of the animals.
Today, the pig industry is dominated by a restricted number of large groups, who are able to control every step of the supply chain and also, are responsible for the disappearance of the small farms that used to characterize our territories. What emerges is a model based on low-cost labour and animal exploitation, which inevitably affects the environment. Polluted waters, land consumption and uncontrolled accumulation of waste are just some of the tangible signs of a system that externalises the consequences of its intensification onto the environment.
Swine fever, from this point of view, can help us to look beyond the economic consequences of the crisis and can remind us to question a model, such as the one of the intense breedings, that needs a structural change. When not only the diet, but even the economic stability of an entire sector relies on a massive slaughtering of living creatures and on the progressive deterioration of the environment, it becomes inevitable to question the true cost of food production:
Once the meat industry has been laid bare, how can we reinvest in it in a more sustainable way?