Pig farmer Alberto Cavagnini has culled 1,600 of his pigs due to swine fever, a virus that threatens Italy’s €20 billion pork industry, including its world-famous prosciutto.
The disease, which is deadly to pigs and devastating to the economy, has particularly affected the northern regions of Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria — and its spread is scaring neighboring France.
Italy recorded cases of the virus in just under 25,000 pigs on 50 farms and in nearly 2,500 wild boars between January 2022 and September this year, according to official figures.
Cavagnini is lucky: the farmer from Brescia in northern Italy has several farms, softening the blow from the slaughter, “but many farmers only have one farm”, so they lose all their animals, he told AFP.
In 2024 alone, 50,000 to 60,000 pigs were slaughtered across Italy.
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EU experts criticized Rome’s handling of the crisis after visiting the Mediterranean country in July.
“The overall disease control strategy in northern Italy needs to be improved. Each region is taking its own measures, with little coordination with its neighbours,” they said in a report.
Brussels recommended adopting a single strategy for the whole of northern Italy, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government appointed a special commissioner to set the rules.
The movement of pigs into contaminated and neighboring areas is prohibited — except for slaughterhouses — while access to farms is kept to a minimum.
“At the moment … we are building barriers” to create zones to limit the movement of wild boars, Francesco Feliziani of the National Swine Fever Reference Center (CEREP) told AFP.
‘Very anxious’
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France is on high alert in areas bordering northern Italy — particularly the Hautes-Alpes, Alpes de Haute-Provence and Alpes-Maritimes — from January 2022.
And in June, an Italian-French technical group was set up to strengthen “cross-border cooperation for more effective management” of what the French government says is a “major threat”.
Those working in Italy’s pork sector, which generates an annual turnover of 20 billion euros ($22 billion) and employs 100,000 people, are “very worried”, Ettore Prandini, head of Italy’s biggest farmers’ union Coldiretti, told AFP.
Italian farms have about 10 million pigs and income losses are estimated at about 25 million euros, farmer Cavagnini said.
Affected farmers will receive compensation from the state, which arrives on average two years later.
But the virus is also affecting hundreds of farmers, who cannot transport pigs between farms, suffering losses of “hundreds of millions” of euros that are not covered, Cavagnini said.
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Commissioner Giovanni Filippini said Thursday that the government “has adopted all measures to prevent the transmission of the virus” and “there have been no new cases in recent days.”
But Coldiretti’s Pradini said farmers should receive more financial help — such as a moratorium on loan repayments — and warned that the virus may be contained but not eradicated.
“If we don’t manage to completely eliminate the presence of wild boar in these areas, the risk is that … the crisis will pass but then come back,” he said.
Source: AFP