It’s like your mama told you. And it’s easy to forget the wisdom of the adage as our days slip by in a long chain of routine, but that’s just when it can all go spectacularly wrong.

The pork industry has had a lot of the unexpected in 2018: Tariffs and hurricanes, right into the teeth of a huge expansion in capacity that isn’t yet completed. And African Swine Fever.

ASF has never been detected in the United States, according to USDA. The ocean that divides the continent from the disease’s origins, in Sub-Saharan Africa, has been a comforting fact. That protective barrier has suddenly gotten a lot thinner, however.

ASF has come and gone over the decades in parts of Europe. It pops up, does its damage and plays itself out. A particular strain of ASF has plagued Russia and Eastern Europe for several years this decade; we at Meatingplace have read about it but not written about it because the disease still was remotely located, unlikely to navigate its way to North America, and didn’t have major implications for the trade in U.S. pork, either.

We’ve written a lot about ASF this fall, though, as circumstances are rapidly changing.

The disease is tearing through the Chinese hog industry, the world’s largest. And the Russian/Eastern Europe outbreak has spread to Western Europe, specifically Belgium. As of the end of September, the Belgian outbreak had been detected only in wild boars, but the way that the disease apparently leapfrogged over several hundred miles of territory has set off alarm bells.

The U.S. hog industry routinely practices the best biosecurity in the world. The farmers and processors are criticized mightily for being “factories” but the supposed bucolic, backyard farming practices common in China and still popular in Europe practically invite these diseases to spread and morph among the livestock population. International trade in the industry is such that, despite the best measures, this virulent virus could easily hitch a ride in some feed, or a shipment of pork, or on somebody’s clothing.

Biosecurity is being stepped up in the hog industry in China and in Europe. U.S. producers are aware and certainly enforcing their rules as strictly as ever. But to pull one of my favorite quotes from the original “Jurassic Park,” “Life finds a way.”

Of course, we expect that the U.S. industry’s advanced biosecurity measures will protect the already-battered U.S. pork industry from harm from yet another quarter.

But then, it’s not the expected that we need to worry about.

Expect the unexpected

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