21 March 2013/09 Jumada l-Ula 1434/01 Farvardin 1391/10 Yi-Mao (2nd month) 4711

“People who dispose of carcasses illegally will be fined 2,000 yuan [$322 USD] and detained for seven days!”-Huang Jun, vice-head of Xinfeng township

Chinese media now claims 13000 pig bodies have been pulled from the Huangpu River.  Investigators expect more, but they’re not blaming disease, they’re blaming climate change, low pay for farmers and increasing demand for food.

At this point investigators say the bodies are showing no signs of epidemic type infections.  Many of the pigs had ear brands that linked them back to Zhulin village in Jiaxing city, Zhejiang Province, but officials there deny throwing pigs into the river.  Many people have described the massive pig farming operations as rotting stinking cesspools, they say when you’re on a train you know you’re passing the area just by the smell.

Some farming towns use vats of chemicals to get rid of dead animals, while other towns burn them.  Many townships have official collection points for dead farm animals, but most farmers still dump the bodies in the river.

There is also an official program to subsidize farmers for every animal that dies, yet local media report that local governments have never received the funding to pay for the program.  In fact, and despite China’s booming economy, government spending on farming programs have been cut.

There are also reports that slaughter houses will buy up pigs from mass die offs, so why are so many ending up in the river?

The reality is that the booming Chinese economy is not trickling down to the farmers.  So to increase their cash flow, and meet the increasing demand for food, farmers have been raising more and more animals in the same amount of space.  This increases the spread of disease and other problems: “I’ve been raising pigs for more than six years. Generally, each pig needs at least 1 cubic meter of space. If that space is too crowded, the temperature and humidity of the farm is affected. It also causes changes in the way the pigs eat and drink, their levels of activity and rest. Drainage also becomes a bigger problem.”-Wang Honglai, farmer from Wangzhuangtou village in Cangzhou, Hebei Province

China’s Ministry of Agriculture has ruled the mass die offs are the result of what are normally common farm animal infections, that are getting out of control due to overcrowding and exacerbated by abnormal weather conditions.