Cebu City DVMF: Enough meat supply until December

Cebu City and Cebu province have closed its borders to all pork products coming from Mindanao |CDND file photo

CEBU CITY, Philippines — An official of the Cebu City Department of Veterinary Medicine and Fisheries (DVMF) has assured that there is enough meat supply in the city until December 2022.

This was given as tighter border controls had already been put in place by the department to ensure that African Swine Fever (ASF) would not enter Cebu province.

READ: Cebu Province temporarily bans entry of poultry from Iloilo and Panay Islands

In a statement from the Cebu City Public Information Office, Jessica Maribojoc, Cebu City veterinarian and DVMF head, guaranteed that the city had a sufficient supply of meat through December this year.

“Maka-sustain ra ta until December. So ayaw kabalaka, naa ra tay lechon sa noche buena,” Maribojoc said.

(We can sustain until December. So, don’t worry, we will have lechon on noche buena.)

Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama instructed Maribojoc to adopt Executive Order (EO) No. 42 issued by Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia on Thursday last week. Cebu City, earlier, banned the entry of pork, live hog, and pork products from Luzon and Mindanao as well as similar products from Korea and China.

The EO has temporarily banned live hogs, pork, and pork products from Iloilo City and the whole of Panay Island as the province aims to protect its multi-billion-peso hog industry after a suspected ASF case was reported in Iloilo.

“Pending the confirmation of the presence of ASF virus in the Province of Iloilo, the Provincial Government of Cebu cannot risk the incursion of the disease within its territorial jurisdiction through the delivery and transportation of live hogs, board semen, pork, and pork-related products from Iloilo and Panay island,” read a portion of Garcia’s EO No. 42 series of 2022.

Maribojoc said Cebu mainly sourced its hogs for its lechon industry from Negros Oriental.

She also advised the public to check on their supplier’s meat inspection certificate to ensure safety of the meat product.

Maribojoc has emphasized that the city has been aligning with the policy of the province in guarding against the entry of ASF as Central Visayas is now the only remaining region in the country with no reported case of the disease.

She then thanked the Regional Quarantine Service in also assigning personnel at the ports and in mountain gateway roads to set up checkpoints to monitor the entry of meat.

The ASF virus is highly contagious and causes a very high mortality among hogs.

According to Maribojoc, the virus can survive in infected meat for up to 1,000 days before dying when exposed to extremely high temperatures, such as those created during incineration.

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