Here are a few excerpts from the World Ark magazine's piece on the subject (which also talks about a more recent eradication of swine in Egypt):
The disease appeared again in 1978 in the Dominican Republic after an airport employee supposedly fed a local pig contaminated scraps from Spain. The Dominican authorities asked for help from the United States Department of Agriculture to identify the disease that they had never seen before. Once the disease was identified, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the cooperation of the Dominican Republic government, began an eradication program to prevent the spread of the disease further, especially to keep it from leaving the island nation and infecting pig operations in the United States and Mexico. ...
Meanwhile, next door in Haiti, dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier heard that the U.S. government was paying $15 for every piglet, $25 for every young pig and $40 for every adult pig killed in the Dominican Republic. Baby Doc was keen to begin an eradication program in Haiti, a country where no money passed without Baby Doc taking his cut, so he invited the U.S. to begin an epidemiological study in the country.
Sure enough, African swine fever was discovered in the Artibonite Valley of Haiti, though interestingly enough, few of the Haitian pigs had died of the disease. The skinny Haitian pigs, known by the peasants who kept them as kochon planch (plank pigs), were highly resistant to disease and well adapted to the tropical Haitian environment. These small, black pigs were the descendants of pigs released on the island by the Spanish and various pirates in the 16th century. With 500 years of selection, adapting them to the local environment, the Haitian pigs were perfectly suited to the Haitian environment and agricultural system.
The pigs are said to have been able to go for three days without eating and survive on meager scraps of food. They would eat tubers and worms in farmers' fields after the harvest, naturally plowing the soil for the next harvest and reducing beetle larvae that were harmful to plants.
But with African swine fever's presence among the Creole pigs and the encouragement and cooperation of the Duvalier government, in 1982 the U.S. began a $22-million program to eradicate the pigs of 800,000 Haitian families. The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment on its involvement in the eradication of pigs in Haiti in the 1980s.
To replace the Haitian pigs, the U.S. government, possibly with the best intentions, offered "improved" American pigs. These modern breeds were developed for the industrial meat system in the U.S.: large, fast growing, and so on. But they didn't work so well for Haiti's peasants (my emphasis):
First, there was the cost of actually getting a pig. The U.S. required that peasants provide proper shelter with a concrete floor and demonstrate an ability to feed the pigs before they would place pigs with a family. Given that most Haitians do not have concrete floors themselves, this was prohibitive for many families. Even more than this, the feed cost for the pigs was $90 a year, while most Haitians only make about $130 annually. The American pigs were also more sensitive to disease and required regular veterinary care. The peasants quickly began referring to the pigs as princes a quarter pieds, or "four-footed princes."
But there has been some good news more recently, a new breeding program led by the French to find a locally appropriate breed:
This new breed of pig was developed by a team of French scientists mostly working out of the French National Institute for Agronomic Research. It drew from black pigs in China that were small yet highly productive, crossed with a breed from Gascony, in the south of France, that was probably related to the forebears of the Haitian pig. Scientists then crossed the Sino-Gascon pigs with a spotted pig from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe that was adapted to the tropical environment.
The actual breed of pig now being used is a genetic potpourri whose origins are hard to track, though they likely descended from a mix of the American pigs, the Sino-Gascon-Guadeloupe pigs developed by the French and a breed similar to the original Haitian pig introduced from the islands of the Lesser Antilles. With the mix of breeds and the selection of more than a decade on the Haitian terrain, it seems that there is hope for a return of the Haitian pig once again.
The whole article is worth a read, as it is an example of the folly of thinking that modern always equals better and the value of heirloom breeds of animals and plants. |
