A farmer observes the remains of pigs that died of ASF, as the Dominican Republic announced the slaughter of tens of thousands of animals after detecting outbreaks across the country. Photograph: Ricardo Rojas/Reuters
Dr Francisco Israel Brito, president of the Dominican Federation of Pork Producers, confirms this. “Initially there was a policy to eliminate the small producers in order to contain the illness,” he says. “But then it became clear that, even then, the larger farms couldn’t escape the virus since it was all over the country.
“And the government realised that it was going to be very costly, so they decided to focus on the hotspot areas instead.”
Farmers have been compensated for the killings at a market rate of 120 Dominican pesos/kg (US$ 2.13), but missteps from the Dominican government have not helped to ease farmers’ mistrust.
The international community has been on alert for ASF for years. The Dominican Republic hosted an international conference in Punta Cana in 2018 where ASF was on the agenda. Samples, which had been taken as early as April, were not tested for ASF until July, giving the virus plenty of time to spread.
The Dominican government was quick to point the finger at small farmers on the border in June. But an official report published later by the World Organisation for Animal Health says the country’s first outbreak was in April in the centre of the country, where the majority of industrial-scale pork farms are based.
In a recent report, the international NGO Grain claims the Dominican government is taking advantage of the pig pandemic to eliminate smaller farms, following a similar pattern to that which it reported in China as a result of the ASF variant that has been ravaging states in the former Soviet Union since 2007 and which spread to Asia in 2018.
A smallholder watches over her pigs. In the Dominican Republic many rural people keep pigs in their back yards for their own consumption. Photograph: Ricardo Rojas/Reuters
The Dominican government’s rhetoric has fed the narrative that smaller producers operate illegally and lack the hygiene and nutrition standards to keep the disease at bay.
In Latin America, traspatio – or back yard – pigs are traditionally reared a few at a time for self-consumption, tied to a pole at the back of a modest dwelling where they guzzle food scraps. In 1978, ASF allegedly reached the Dominican Republic via pork leftovers from a flight from Europe fed to a back yard pig outside the airport.
The Dominican government classifies all 28,000 small and medium farms with varying hygiene and nutrition standards as back yard farms. But the small and medium farmers the Guardian spoke to did not feed their pigs on food scraps or let them roam on landfill sites. And they were aware of disease transmission risks.
“Nobody works on this farm except me and one employee. Nobody else visits my farm,” says Echavarría.
Nuñez Mieses acknowledges that “not more than 100 farms” in the whole country meet biosecurity protocols “as described in the manual”, adding: “This disease is an opportunity for the pork industry to organise itself.”
Dr Francisco Israel Brito, president of Fedoporc, the Dominican federation of pork producers, confirms that the government was initially “protecting” the 400 or so industrial farms that produce 70% of all Dominican pork.
But he also acknowledges that, much like the coronavirus, ASF does not discriminate, saying: “It affects the most humble and the most powerful alike.”
Everyone hopes that a repeat of the 1979 US-sponsored eradication of pigs in the Dominican Republic won’t need to be repeated. Photograph: Ricardo Rojas/Reuters
The US recently announced $500m in funding to support activities related to combating ASF in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but a US outbreak is not unthinkable. More than 2 million Dominicans live in the US and the Dominican Republic is a popular destination for American tourists. ASF travels well in cured meat in luggage as well as in uncooked pork scraps on boats and aeroplanes.
If the plan to contain the disease by focusing on small farmers fails in the Dominican Republic, then plan B, according to government sources who spoke to the Guardian, is to destroy the whole swine population, as in 1979, when a US-backed eradication took place, followed by one in Haiti in 1982. This would protect the US pork industry and generate a massive increase in the 27% of Dominican pork consumption that mainly comes from the US.
Paul G Rudenberg, a US veterinarian who was part of the USAID effort to introduce pigs from Iowa to Haiti in the mid 1980s, doubts an eradication effort would be politically viable today. He says: “It may have been necessary. But it wasn’t run in the manner that was conducive to the benefit of the small farmer. As a result, it wreaked social economic havoc on Haiti.”
A glimmer of hope lies in the recent development by the US of a potential candidate for a vaccine against ASF; 40 years later, it looks like Big Brother is again likely to call the shots.
As for the small and medium sized farmers in the Dominican Republic, more than anything, what they don’t want is for certain farmers to get preferential treatment due to their size or government contacts.
“As a pig farmer, I am never going to be in favour of eradication. But if they are going to slaughter some of them, they have to slaughter them all,” says Echavarría.