SINGAPORE – It could take up to a year before the Indonesian farm that supplies two-thirds of Singapore’s freshly slaughtered pork once again exports live pigs to the Republic.
The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said this in a Facebook post on Tuesday, in an update after Singapore detected African swine fever in a consignment of pigs from Pulau Bulan on April 19, and stopped imports from the island.
The authorities will continue to assess the situation on Pulau Bulan, located in Indonesia’s Riau Islands province, which accounts for 15 per cent of the city-state’s total pork supply.
African swine fever does not affect humans but is highly contagious and deadly to wild boars and pigs.
“Such food supply disruptions can happen from time to time,” said SFA, adding that it will continue working with the industry to diversify import sources.
For instance, Mexico was recently approved to export chilled pork to Singapore, it said.
Six suppliers from the country were given the green light to export pork to Singapore, according to an SFA circular dated April 28.
Separately, the Meat Traders Association (Singapore) said on Tuesday in a Facebook post that there is sufficient stock of frozen pork to “last for months” should the supply chain be disrupted.
The association represents about 80 members from the meat production and trading industry here.
It said it was committed to support hotels, restaurants, caterers, retailers, wet markets and cooked food stallholders in ensuring a constant supply of pork for their businesses.
The association also urged industry players and consumers to be open to alternative supply sources and remain flexible by considering chilled or frozen pork from other sources.
According to a May 2 report by the World Organisation for Animal Health, African swine fever was first detected in the consignment of animals from Pulau Bulan as part of an investigation into high mortalities of the shipment.
The report said all pigs in the imported consignment have been slaughtered, with 55 found to have died of the virus while 95 infected pigs were killed and disposed.
This marked the first occurrence of African swine fever in pigs imported into Singapore.
The virus was confirmed to have arrived in Singapore on Feb 7, after it was detected in a wild boar carcass in the north-west of the country.
The abattoir in Jurong where the virus was detected in pig carcasses has been sanitised and operations have resumed with a shipment of live pigs from Sarawak, Malaysia.
Last week, a veterinary authority official at Riau Islands province told The Straits Times that the pigs in Pulau Bulan were likely to have been hit by a new strain of the African swine fever virus as their clinical symptoms differed slightly from those found in previous cases in North Sumatra and other parts of Indonesia.
Half of the 70,000 pigs on the Pulau Bulan farm are currently under lockdown to prevent further infections while those infected and kept in the same cages have been culled, the official said.