Farmers left to battle pig-wasting disease on own

Pork industry leaders believe farmers may have to pay 69c an animal to keep a pig-wasting disease out of the South Island.

The Pork Industry Board has completed a series of meetings with farmers to gauge support for a strategy to contain and possibly eradicate post-weaning multisystemic wasting syndrome, which affects young pigs.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry is unwilling to commit funds, arguing that it is impossible to completely eliminate the syndrome because there is no screening test to prove if it has been successful.

This has left the Pork Board to ask pig farmers to commit between 33c and 69c a pig slaughtered for a seven-to 10-year period.

Board chairman Chris Trengrove said the industry would not attempt to contain the disease without believing there was a good chance of success.

He stressed there was no food or human safety issue, and that the syndrome existed in every pig-producing nation apart from Australia.

"It is a disease spread from pig to pig so there is some confidence that we can contain it," he said. "We would be reasonably confident we could keep it out of the South Island."

Southern farms are clear of the syndrome, a combination of diseases which have hit mainly the Waikato.

North Island pigs and pig products are prevented from crossing Cook Strait, and MAF inspections of 50 southern piggeries earlier this year failed to find any evidence of the disease.

Trengrove said the board was frustrated with the Biosecurity Act and the two years it could take to get a pest strategy through.

"Basically the horse could have bolted by the time you get the tools to control or eradicate a disease."

The disease was discovered at an Orini property, east of Huntly, last September, but the board said it had been in New Zealand since 1999, when overseas pig meat was increasingly entering the country.

The board's theory is that pigs in the Auckland area were fed waste food containing infected pork products, and the disease was spread by stock movements among a network of farms.

In 1998, MAF let lapse restrictions requiring piggeries to cook waste feed before it was fed to animals.

Trengrove said MAF's confidence that border restrictions were robust enough to keep pig diseases out had since been proved wrong.

The disease syndrome causes wasting and mortalities in six to 12-week-old pigs, but so far seems less virulent in New Zealand.

Trengrove said farmers could learn to live with the disease, but would never get rid of it without completely "depopulating" all stock - an option few could afford.

- NZPA