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African swine fever in DR heightens the need for regionalization agreements

The head of the US Meat Export Federation says the recent finding of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic emphasizes the importance of reaching regionalization protocols with key trading partners.  

Dan Halstrom says the agreements are designed to prevent long-term significant disruptions to global trade.  “You have something that impacts the country as a whole (like a foreign animal disease), but then it’s up to us to show that protocols are in a place where the country as a whole is not necessarily impacted by it,” he says.  “And then you proceed accordingly.”

Regionalization protocols are science-based, and if a country can make a scientific case that a disease outbreak has been contained to a geographic region and a limited set of products, then trade bans should not target unaffected products from other regions of that country.

He says tells Brownfield these types of agreements have been used in other parts of the world, so some precedent has been set. “But, it’s a monumental task,” he says.  “It’s a little hard to set up a protocol in advance until you know exactly what the issue is and where it is.” Halstrom says establishing ground rules around regionalization agreements will likely become a top priority for the industry. 

Regionalization protocols were utilized to help reopen poultry trade with countries following the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza outbreak in 2015.