Actress Bea Alonzo, nursing a broken heart, once said: “Time is the ultimate truth teller.”
This was proven ultimately true in Cebu where the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) declared in March an outbreak of the feared African Swine Fever (ASF) virus, first detected allegedly in Carcar City and then in strategic LGUs across the province that have the biggest hog raisers in the region.
According to BAI bulletin, ASF is contagious. Once a hog gets the disease, it will certainly die. Hence, the BAI ordered the indiscriminate culling — killing — of hogs within the 500-meter radius where the virus was detected.
And yet by December this year, there was still no recorded massive deaths of hogs that resulted from the alleged ASF detection falsely reported by the BAI.
Aside from culling, the agency also implemented a color-coding scheme that assigns the degree of the presence of the virus in LGUs in Cebu, disrupting hog mobility by the strict non-issuance of travel and other necessary BAI-issued permits.
These prompted a quick response from Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia who, in a mad scramble to defend Cebu’s 11-billion-peso hog industry under sinister and coordinated attack by the BAI, ordered the immediate stoppage of the agency’s disruptive protocols in Cebu without prior consultation with the Capitol.
“There’s only one reasoning that I have been listening to and been given. ‘We kill the pigs even though they’re healthy, so they will not get infected. Because if they get infected, they might die. So we better kill them so they would not die,’” Gov. Gwen told the media in one of her presser in March.
“I am hearing nonsensical – this is a nonsensical policy honestly,” she added.
The governor suspected that what the BAI detected was not really the deadly ASF but the Classical Swine Fever (CSF) or more commonly called hog cholera, which is curable.
Since then, cases have been filed by the Capitol in court against BAI officials for their involvement in the controversy.
The governor has been on top of the situation by creating the Barangay Swine Fever Task Force that monitors the situation of backyard hog raisers down to the purok and household levels, with mechanism in place for sending daily reports to the municipal, city, and provincial veterinarians for appropriate actions.
The Capitol also embarks on a massive hog vaccination for backyard hog raisers in the province, protecting them from the CSF and other hog diseases.
Cebu remains to be ASF-FREE, and Cebu’s ever bustling multi-billion-peso hog industry continues to grow, with Cebu becoming the country’s biggest hog producer because, while other provinces succumbed to BAI’s culling policy, Cebu stood her ground and said:
“𝐃𝐎𝐍’𝐓 𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐔𝐒!”