Rome has awakened. But also Milan, Turin, Bologna. Italy is waking up to the nightmare of swine fever, a curse that has accompanied Sardinia for the past fifty years. Our farmers and our veterinary service know it well, but also some politicians who are more attentive than others. And the island consumers know it too, even if they have not necessarily considered consuming Sardinian, Emilian or Polish meat. The emergency in Sardinia must have certainly gone unnoticed by many of our fellow countrymen if we believe the alarm raised on Sunday by an important newspaper: PSA risks weighing 30 billion on exports from Northern Italy. The report retraces the journey of the virus, which started in Kenya in 1907 and landed in Italy, it says, in 2022. One wonders what the source could be, considering that Sardinia (an Italian region, right?) recorded the first outbreak of African swine fever in 1978, unleashing a tsunami for the agricultural economy of the island.
The main vehicle of the virus (which is not transmitted to humans) is wild fauna, namely wild boars. For decades we have not been able to export hams and sausages, but not even piglets. No Sardinian meat for our emigrants, for Sardinian restaurateurs in the world. To participate in the great showcase of the Expo in Milan, in 2015, an entrepreneur invented the “thermized” piglet, relying on an exceptional exemption from the Ministry of Health.
In Sardinia there are 14 thousand farms, with an average production of 200 thousand heads per year. Translated: damages for billions of lire first and tens of millions of euros later. A biblical scourge made of slaughters and compensations (yes, some bad apples among our breeders have been there and have profited) but, above all, made of frustration for many serious people, who have had to invest money and effort to defend themselves from contact with wild fauna, putting up fences and barriers in the name of biosecurity. In Sardinia, the last battle in the war against the virus was the elimination of wild grazing, with the slaughter, one by one, of all the potential carriers. Tears and blood, pain and threats, consensus and attacks. This was evidently not enough to turn a national spotlight on the Sardinia case, erased with a stroke of the pen from the PSA map.
Ironically, today the Island is one step away from the last European stamp certifying the eradication of African swine fever from the entire regional territory. That is, while other regions are experiencing blockades and culls, our meat is about to get its passport back. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
Swine fever, agalactia, brucellosis, mad cow disease, bluetongue, scrapie, avian flu, Nile fever. Or, if you prefer, moving from farms to fields and greenhouses, downy mildew, tomato yellow virus, citrus canker, psylla, red spider mite or, thinking of the forest heritage, lymantria dispar or phytophthora cinnamori. We have not missed anything under the Sardinian sun. An island that has always kept its doors wide open to the invader of the moment. And that has had to fight, in recent decades, titanic battles against imported pests. But the war, the real war to be won, is not fought with vaccines and plant protection products, but by setting up an effective system of control in ports and airports. And this is where politics comes into play, or rather should, incapable of defending the added value of insularity. Examples abound, unfortunately, in addition to plants and animals. Italy has awakened on the African Swine Fever front, almost unaware that we have been going through it for almost fifty years. It happens too often.