HONG KONG — A man in a white protective suit parked a dump truck at the edge of a dusty pit and unloaded a pile of pink carcasses. They tumbled to the ground just as a second truck arrived with another batch. The scene at a Hong Kong landfill this week was part of a government effort to kill and dispose of 6,000 pigs from a slaughterhouse where one of them had been found to have African swine fever. It was the latest turn in an outbreak that has decimated pig herds in the Chinese mainland and rapidly spread elsewhere in Asia in recent months, and which experts say shows no sign of stopping — particularly since containing the disease is a challenge in a region where many producers are small-scale farmers. And because China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of pork, the mainland government’s move to cull more than a million pigs is now being felt across a sprawling global industry that includes truckers, pork dealers and soybean feed farmers.

Source: New York Times May 14, 2019 10:41 UTC