Warding Off A Pig Plague

If African swine fever reaches Puerto Rico it could shut down U.S. pork exports

- Jim Wyss

Shortly after officials detained six migrants from the Dominican Republic who had landed on the western coast of Puerto Rico on Sept. 24, a team of investigators in white protective gear descended on the beach. They weren’t searching for drugs or contraband but another threat: pork.

The Western Hemisphere registered its first outbreak of African swine fever virus in almost 40 years on July 28 at pig farms in the Dominican Republic. By September the devastating disease had been found in neighboring Haiti. Now the U.S., the world’s largest pork producer after China, is scrambling to keep the malady from washing ashore and potentially shutting down its $7.7 billion pork export industry.

While Puerto Rico is more than 2,200 miles from the hog farms of Iowa, it’s part of the U.S. And it’s experiencing a dramatic rise in undocumented migrants from African swine fever hot spots. That’s driving fears that an outbreak on the Caribbean island could trigger an export ban on all U.S. pork products. “This isn’t just a Puerto Rican problem,” says Ramón González, the island’s agriculture secretary. “This is a problem for the entire United States.”