This Friday, the Government of Mexico restricted the import of pork from Spain after the appearance of an outbreak of African swine fever in Barcelona, as reported by the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture in a statement. The suspension affects commercial operations, but also products containing pork and transported by travelers. The Mexican agency has assured that the measure is adopted “based on international protocols” to protect the country’s pork production.
African swine fever is a disease capable of killing pigs on a farm in a few days with fever, coughing and bleeding. Spain had gotten rid of that threat in the last three decades. Until now. The Central Veterinary Laboratory of Algete (Madrid) has confirmed the positive for this disease in the corpses of two wild boars found last Wednesday in the vicinity of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, about 20 kilometers north of the Catalan capital, last Wednesday. They are the first cases in Spain since November 1994.
The appearance of the plague has caused the preventive blockade of pork exports, as explained this Friday by the general director of Agri-Food Production of the Ministry, Emilio García Muro, general director of Agri-Food Production of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, who has described what happened as “bad news, very bad.” It is one of the points that the Mexican agency has collected to support its decision and thus avoid possible animal health risks to national production.
Mexico thus puts a temporary barrier to the largest pork producer in the European Union, with 24% of the total, and the third in the world, only surpassed by China and the United States, according to data from the Spanish Ministry. The plague has roamed the area of sub-Saharan Africa, but in 2007 it reached Georgia, from where it entered territories such as Russia and China. It is the path that led to its presence in the eastern part of the European Union in 2014. A few years later, in 2020, it also arrived in Germany, at a time when the country was positioned as the largest pig producer in Europe. The root of the problem in that case was also a wild boar. It is one of the diseases to watch out for, as a single case of plague puts the affected country in quarantine, unable to export pork.
In 2024, Mexico exported an amount of frozen pork with a value of around 507 million dollars and imported an amount relative to about 448 million, according to data from the Ministry of Economy. Spain was the fourth largest supplier of frozen pork in Mexico (worth about $5.3 million). Before the European country were the United States (276 million), Brazil (113) and Canada (46.8).
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