African swine fever took a while to arrive in the green hills of Guangdong, in southern China. But when it did it came with a vengeance.
The first government-confirmed cases appeared late last year. Authorities responded by culling more than 6,000 pigs and offering farmers compensation — the playbook developed elsewhere in China, where the disease has ravaged the country’s once 400m-strong pig population. There have been no official cases confirmed in Guangdong since Christmas Day.
Yet a trip to the outskirts of Guangzhou, the province’s flourishing capital city, shows the difficulty of containing the disease. As ASF has spread further south in China and on into south-east Asia, questions have arisen whether Beijing’s response inadvertently helped to compound the problem and flooded domestic markets with potentially contaminated meat.