Chaos as Spain scrambles to stem swine fever outbreak and pork banned from UK | World | News

Spain has deployed the army to fight against a swine fever outbreak after its pork was banned from entering the UK. African swine fever had not been seen in the country since 1994, but 80 members of Spain’s military emergency unit were deployed to northeastern Spain on Monday to join police officers and Civil Protection Agency personnel in removing potentially infected boars.

“Our objective is to limit the zone and avoid contagion to other regions,” Agriculture minister Luis Planas told reporters late on Monday. Authorities confirmed that two wild boar found dead had tested positive for African swine fever on Friday, and a 6-km exclusion zone was set up around the affected area in Bellaterra.

Four hundred Catalan police and rural wardens were deployed to the area on the far side of the Collserola mountain range at the weekend.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs confirmed on Friday that pork has been banned from entering the UK “until further notice”.

“We take the threat of animal diseases extremely seriously and our commitment to maintaining the country’s biosecurity is unwavering,” Defra said in a statement.

It has serious implications for Spain’s hugely important export industry, which Planas said was worth around €8.8 billion (£7.7 billion). According to Spanish news outlet El Pais, the impact of a potential crisis in the pork sector is “enormous”.

It noted that Spain is the main supplier in Europe and the third in the world, but that around 40 countries had blocked imports to prevent the disease from spreading.

While harmless to humans, it spreads rapidly among pigs and wild boar, and it can be carried on shoes, car tyres and cooked meats.

The most recent theory suggests that the disease entered the country after a pig consumed discarded food purchased from outside Spain.

“The most likely option … is that cold cuts, a sandwich, contaminated food, could end up in a bin … and then that a wild boar would have eaten it and become infected,” Catalonia’s agriculture minister Oscar Ordeig told local radio on Monday.

Spain’s farmers’ association, Asaja, said the sector was ready to face the outbreak, but called on authorities to address an “out-of-control presence” of wild animals that risked contaminating livestock.