The province announced Friday it’s starting the process toward a permanent ban on mink farming — beginning with a ban on mink breeding, followed by a ban on live mink on farms by April 2023 and “all operations ceasing completely” by 2025. All pelts must be sold by that time.

The province cited data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, highlighting a concern over the risk of the COVID-19 coronavirus mutating in mink and being passed back to people.

On top of that risk, the province said, are concerns that any “subsequent mutations” of the virus could spread even more easily and “could have an impact on vaccine effectiveness.”

The province in July slapped a moratorium on any new mink farms in B.C. and capped the number of animals at its current level, effectively limiting purchases of more animals.

That decision, the province said, came after a stretch of time in which two of B.C.’s nine mink farms saw workers test positive for COVID-19, and three saw mink test positive for the virus.

Public health officials have highlighted concerns over allowing the remaining mink farms to continue operating and breeding, including the “ongoing persistence” of infected mink and workers at mink farms contracting COVID-19 from mink — and transmitting the virus on to “broader human populations.”

Furthermore, the province said, officials are mindful of the presence of the “highly transmissible” Delta variant of COVID and the risk of that virus being introduced in mink farms, even from vaccinated people.

Also, the province said, the risk remains that any escapees from a mink farm could transmit COVID-19 to wild animals, which in turn could also pose a threat to public health.

As well, officials pointed out the “challenges” of maintaining strict biosecurity and monitoring “over the longer term” on mink farms.

Public health officials raised their concerns following outreach and discussion with animal health experts and mink producers about “managing the threat of the virus,” the province said.

“This decision follows the recommendations of public health officials and infectious disease experts about managing the threat of the virus for workers at the farms and the broader public,” provincial Ag Minister Lana Popham said Friday in a release.

“Our government will work with affected farmers and workers to help them pursue other farming, business or job opportunities that support their families.”

‘Variant of concern’

The province’s decision doesn’t sit well with the B.C. Mink Producers’ Association, which said Friday it’s “shocked, angered and devastated” by Popham’s announcement.

“We’ve done everything that has been asked of us. We’ve always gone above and beyond to protect our families, farms and the public,” association president Joe Williams said in a separate release.

“We are both mentally and financially exhausted from the political theatre and really wish it would end, so that we go back to providing for our families and supporting our communities.”

Since COVID first turned up on a B.C. mink farm in December last year, the province’s mink farmers have worked to set up “even more intensive biosecurity measures to contain the farm outbreaks, prevent additional outbreaks, protect their animals, and safeguard the health of their families, employees and the public.”

Only one mink farm in the province is currently infected, the association said, and “therefore we will be forced to kill herds of perfectly healthy animals.”

The association said its members seek the “same consideration and respect” granted to other livestock sectors during outbreaks of other zoonotic diseases such as H1N1 and avian flu.

In those cases, the association said, “government did not propose (or even consider) the banning of these sectors… (but) worked with the farmers and supported them in efforts to mitigate risk.”

A separate release Friday from the Canada Mink Breeders Association quotes Wisconsin veterinarian Dr. John Easley, director of research for Fur Commission USA, as saying that while the COVID-19 virus has been detected on mink farms in “many” countries over the past 18 months, “the vast majority of these infections have been self-limiting, and posed very limited risk to the caretakers of the livestock.”

The CMBA also quoted the World Health Organization as saying no “variants of concern” have developed on mink farms.

Viral mutations are often “species-specific” in their pathology, Easley said, which means the COVID virus circulating in the human population — “especially the unvaccinated population” – is at greater risk of producing a “variant of concern.”

“So, if the governmental agencies’ goal is to reduce the risk of a new variant of concern being developed, why haven’t they already mandated that all the citizens be vaccinated?” he said.

“And how are they going to address the risk due to the domestic cat population’s susceptibility to the virus — or all the other animal species (including hamsters, ferrets, and white-tailed deer) that we now know can be infected and reproduce the virus?”

CMBA president Rob Bollert, in the same release, accused the province of surrendering to “pressure tactics” from animal activist groups “rather than basing policy on science and proven good practice.”

B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, in the province’s release Friday, said officials have been “monitoring and managing outbreaks related to mink farming… but as this remains an ongoing public health issue, we believe the risk is too great for operations to continue as they were.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported infections of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wild white-tailed deer in the state of Ohio, according to a statement. There were no reports of deer showing symptoms of infection, USDA said.

“We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2,” USDA spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole wrote in an e-mail to Reuters. “It’s possible they were exposed through people, the environment, other deer, or another animal species.”

USDA has previously reported COVID-19 in animals including dogs, cats, tigers, lions, snow leopards, otters, gorillas and minks.

Worldwide, most animal infections were reported in species that had close contact with a person with COVID-19, according to the agency.

USDA reported last month that white-tailed deer populations in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, based on a study that analyzed serum samples from free-ranging deer for antibodies to the disease.

The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine collected samples from the infected deer in Ohio from January to March as part of ongoing studies, USDA said.

The samples were presumed to be positive for COVID-19 in university tests, and the cases were confirmed at USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories, according to the statement.

— Reporting for Reuters by Tom Polansek in Chicago.

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The government in December enforced its third ban on alcohol sales since the outbreak of the virus to alleviate pressure on strained healthcare facilities after a rise in infections.

Unutilized stocks of barley, which is mainly planted for malting purposes in South Africa, stood at around 719,307 tonnes by December, 49 per cent higher than a year ago, according to data from the South African Grain Information Service.

Farmers say the ban is further hurting a sector still reeling from effects of drought conditions in 2019.

“The biggest impact will be on next year’s mandate to supply malt barley for the industry,” said Jose De Kock, chairman of the Barley Industry Committee, referencing to the 2021-22 season where plantings are due to start in around April.

“With the carryover that is already in the pipeline they are going to limit the mandate for next year, that is the fear,” he added.

Farmers could plant other crops, but De Kock said this may not be a complete solution with some of them in a crop rotation as part of disease and weed control measures.

“You can juggle a bit to the one side or the other side but you cannot not plant barley,” he said.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), which uses malting barley in beer making, lowered its mandate for the 2020-21 season to 380,000 tonnes from 475,000 tonnes in the previous season.

“There is the possibility that we will have to reduce the mandate further if the ban should continue,” AB Inbev’s director of agricultural development in Africa, Josh Hammann, said.

This may force farmers to sell excess barley as animal feed, which can be a 40-50 per cent markdown from the price of malting barley, said Abrie Rautenbach, head of ABSA’s AgriBusiness.

South African Breweries, part of AB InBev, is challenging the alcohol ban in court.

— Tanisha Heiberg is a Reuters correspondent in Johannesburg.

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Denmark’s entire herd of some 17 million mink, one of the world’s biggest and highly valued for the quality of its fur, was ordered to be culled in early November after hundreds of farms suffered outbreaks of the COVID-19 coronavirus and authorities found mutated strains of the virus among people.

Lawmakers on Monday agreed a deal that includes compensation to the farmers for idle machinery and lost revenue until 2030, the country’s finance ministry said in a statement.

Denmark was the top exporter of mink to luxury fashion labels, with its pelts in high demand due to high breeding standards.

The move to cull Denmark’s entire mink population left the government reeling, and prompted its agriculture minister to step down after it admitted it did not have the legal basis to order the culling of healthy mink.

Monday’s deal also allows farmers to begin breeding mink when a temporary ban ends next year.

In Canada, two mink farms in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley were placed under quarantine last month after animals at both properties, and workers at one of the properties, were confirmed to have COVID-19, believed to be the first such cases in Canadian farmed mink.

Testing at the site of the first outbreak showed the infected people and animals had an “identical or nearly identical strain” which has already been circulating in people in the province, “indicating COVID-19 spread from people to animals and not the other way around.”

As for the second farm, the provincial ag ministry said Dec. 24 that it’s “not currently known how the mink contracted the virus and the ministry is currently working with stakeholders to identify potential sources.”

Canada’s mink farms — fewer than 100 across the country, mainly in Ontario and Nova Scotia — reportedly began tightening their biosecurity in 2020 after COVID-19 cases began to appear in farmed mink, first in the Netherlands in April, then in Italy, Spain, Sweden and the U.S. as well as Denmark.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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U.S. states, cities and hospitals are scrambling to buy freezers that can safely store Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine at temperatures of -70 C, significantly below the standard for vaccines.

Moderna’s vaccine can be stored at -20 C.

Smithfield, owned by China’s WH Group, has multiple “ultra-cold” freezers and will work with local authorities to provide assistance as needed, said chief administrative officer Keira Lombardo, without providing details.

The company is “ready and willing to assist health agencies should storage capacity become constrained,” she said in a statement to Reuters.

Thousands of meatpacking workers employed by Smithfield and rivals like Tyson Foods and JBS USA have been infected with COVID-19. Nearly 20 U.S. meat plants were shut in the spring due to outbreaks, tightening supplies, raising prices and making meatpacking one of the industries most impacted by the pandemic in the United States.

Smithfield may be able to keep Moderna’s vaccine in static freezers that store meat before it is exported or sold, said Chris Hodges, a former senior vice-president of business development for the company.

Other “blast” freezers that push cold air onto meat before it is moved into static freezers could potentially get cold enough to hold Pfizer’s version, although it would be very expensive to run them for long periods of time, he said.

“As it becomes more clear that successful vaccines will become available, we have communicated our capabilities and continued willingness to partner with health officials, including with vaccine distribution and storage,” Lombardo said.

Working with health agencies, Smithfield expects it can help distribute vaccines rapidly to food and agricultural workers hit hard by the pandemic, Lombardo said. The company also offered to aid distribution to other essential workers through healthcare offices at its facilities.

Meatpacking workers are considered essential in many states, but not at the top of the list for vaccines, which are expected to be distributed first to healthcare workers and nursing home residents.

Organizations representing food and meat companies have asked U.S. President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden for priority access to vaccines for workers.

Tyson said in an e-mail to Reuters it was closely monitoring the development of vaccines and working with healthcare experts on planning and distribution models for employees.

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago.

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Denmark ordered all farmed mink to be culled early this month after finding that 12 people had been infected by a mutated strain of the virus that causes COVID-19, which passed from humans to mink and back to humans.

The decision led to 17 million animals being destroyed and to the resignation last week of Food and Agriculture Minister Morgens Jensen, after it was determined that the order was illegal.

Dead mink were tipped into trenches at a military area in western Denmark and covered with two metres of soil. But hundreds have begun resurfacing, pushed out of the ground by what authorities say is gas from their decomposition. Newspapers have referred to them as the “zombie mink.”

Jensen’s replacement, Rasmus Prehn, said Friday he supported the idea of digging up the animals and incinerating them. He said he had asked the environmental protection agency look into whether it could be done, and parliament would be briefed on the issue on Monday.

The macabre burial sites, guarded 24 hours a day to keep people and animals away, have drawn complaints from area residents about possible health risks.

Authorities say there is no risk of the graves spreading the coronavirus, but locals worry about the risk of contaminating drinking water and a bathing lake less than 200 metres away.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen.

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Fresh supplies of beef won’t arrive for days, a salesman at the Suning.com-owned Carrefour outlet told Reuters — if then. That’s a big setback for the industry at traditionally one of its busiest times of the year.

“Whether we can get supplies then, and how much, remains a question,” said the sales person, who declined to be identified as he was not allowed to talk to media.

Suning did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China began testing batches of imported chilled and frozen meat and seafood for the coronavirus in June, but significantly ramped up its inspections early this month after port workers in several cities tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The new measures, which include testing much more product than before and additional disinfection, are raising costs for importers while adding time and layers of red tape in an industry used to working at speed to guarantee freshness.

The move is especially hurting the booming beef trade, worth US$8.65 billion last year and growing rapidly, as some importers cut purchases on rising costs and weaker demand caused by consumers’ coronavirus worries.

Though China says the risk of shoppers catching the virus from chilled foods is low, officials said this week there is still a risk of infection, particularly for handlers who repeatedly come into contact with the outer packaging of imported cold-chain food.

In Tianjin, northern China’s most important port for meat shipments, the trade has come to a virtual halt, after a worker tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month.

Warehouses were ordered to test all frozen meat before it could be shipped to the market, and no new product can enter, three importers told Reuters.

Three out of five supermarkets in Beijing visited by Reuters this week were short of beef.

A salesperson at Meat Mate, a restaurant and retailer selling chilled Australian beef, said it now needs to place orders three months in advance, instead of one previously, to deal with the delays. Nobody at Meat Mate’s headquarters could be reached for comment.

Now Beijing’s Xinfadi wholesale market, linked to a coronavirus outbreak in June, has also suspended sales and storage of cold-chain and aquatic products, state media reported this week.

Demand dips

Growing concerns about catching COVID-19 from frozen product has dented demand too.

“Orders for imported beef have halved for us as our clients have got concerned about COVID recently,” said a beef trader in Tianjin.

“They ask us when the products were shipped and whether they have been tested when placing the orders. We have been selling lots of domestic products lately,” she added.

Testing and the additional time product sits in warehouses has driven up costs for importers by as much as 200 per cent, traders said.

A beef importer based in southwestern China said he has reduced imports to less than one quarter of the volumes of previous years even as China enters its peak demand season ahead of the New Year and Lunar New Year holidays.

“What if your cargoes get hit (with the virus)? It will be huge trouble. I’d rather import less,” said the importer surnamed Fu.

Slower imports come as China’s domestic pork production recovers from a severe disease outbreak and prices fall from record highs.

With more domestic meat being produced and the local economy also slowing due to the global coronavirus pandemic, beef demand was already taking a hit, said Grace Gao, manager at Goldrich International, a beef importer in Dalian.

Many beef importers have also had to deal with the impact from souring trade relations with key beef supplier Australia.

After cutting back on Australian purchases, Fu is now reducing imports from other origins too, including Brazil, Argentina, and Belarus.

“This year has been really miserable,” he said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Hallie Gu, Beijing newsroom and Dominique Patton.

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The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the meatpacking industry, infecting thousands of workers since the spring and forcing companies such as Tyson, Smithfield Foods and JBS to shut slaughterhouses hit by outbreaks.

The son of a worker at a Tyson facility in Waterloo, Iowa, who died in April of complications from the virus, filed a lawsuit that claims plant managers misled workers about COVID-19 and allowed sick employees to continue working.

The worker, Isidro Fernandez, got sick because of his job, according to the lawsuit that was amended on Nov. 11.

The Waterloo facility is Tyson’s largest U.S. pork plant, processing 19,500 hogs a day, or about five per cent of total U.S. pork production.

COVID-19 infected more than 1,000 employees out of about 2,800 at the plant, and five died, the lawsuit says. Tyson idled the plant in late April because of an outbreak.

Earlier that month, manager Tom Hart “organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19,” according to the lawsuit.

Hart could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tyson said it suspended employees involved in the accusations and retained the law firm Covington and Burling to conduct an independent investigation led by Holder.

“If these claims are confirmed, we’ll take all measures necessary to root out and remove this disturbing behaviour from our company,” the company said.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch first reported on the betting allegations in the lawsuit on Wednesday.

“This shocking report of supervisors allegedly taking bets on how many workers would get infected, pressuring sick workers to stay on the job, and failing to enforce basic safety standards, should outrage every American,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union.

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago.

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China says it has found the virus on the packaging of products from 20 countries including German pork, Brazilian beef and Indian fish, but foreign officials say the lack of evidence produced by authorities means it is damaging trade and hurting the reputation of imported food without reason.

In a World Trade Organization meeting Nov. 5-6, Canada called China’s testing of imported foods and rejection of products that had positive nucleic acid tests “unjustified trade restrictions” and urged it to stop it, said a Geneva-based trade official briefed on the meeting who declined to be identified.

Supported by Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Britain and the U.S., Canada argued that China had not provided scientific justification for the measures, said the official.

Canada’s Geneva-based mission to the WTO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. said on Tuesday it asked China “bilaterally” and at the WTO to ensure its measures “appropriately assess actual risks, particularly when they unjustifiably restrict trade.”

“China’s most recent COVID-19 restrictions on imported food products are not based on science and threaten to disrupt trade,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

China has only intensified its imported food screening since then.

This week, the Global Times, a tabloid backed by the ruling Communist Party, suggested that the presence of the novel coronavirus on imported food raised the possibility that the virus, widely believed to have originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, may have come from overseas.

China began testing chilled and frozen food imports for the virus in June, after a cluster of infections among workers at a wholesale food market in the capital.

The World Health Organization says neither food nor packaging are known transmission routes for the virus.

But China, which has all-but stamped out local transmission of the disease, says there is risk of the virus re-entering the country on food products.

‘Is it true?’

The pushback came after months of growing frustration at the way customs and health authorities have been increasingly scrutinizing imports, which trade partners complain does not adhere to global norms.

“Whenever a health authority performs a test, and finds something, they should share the results,” said a Beijing-based diplomat who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to media.

“We haven’t received one single lab analysis,” he said. “Everyone is asking ‘Is it true? Did they really find anything?’ Everyone is surprised that no proof is given.”

On Monday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern also questioned China’s findings, after the city of Jinan said it had detected coronavirus on frozen New Zealand beef.

Ardern said she was confident no meat products were exported from her country with the coronavirus but no clarification had come from China.

In August, Brazilian officials travelled to the city of Shenzhen after it found traces of the coronavirus on chicken wings from their country.

Authorities could not provide information on whether they had found the active virus or not, the Brazilian agriculture ministry said.

In its response at the WTO, China said its actions were “provisional based on scientific basis” and designed to “protect people’s lives to the maximum extent,” according to a Chinese trade official.

China has pointed to its isolation of live coronavirus from samples on imported frozen cod, a world-first, as proof, though with the evidence unpublished, that the coronavirus can be transmitted from food to people.

Speaking at a food safety conference this month, Gudrun Gallhoff, minister counsellor for health and food safety at the European Union delegation to China, said exporters needed more information on China’s test methods and results.

“If you have trade partners you have to treat them fairly and give them a chance to be complicit,” she said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Dominique Patton in Beijing and Emma Farge in Geneva; additional reporting by Tom Polansek in Chicago.

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Global health officials are eying the animals as a potential risk for people after Denmark last week embarked on a plan to eliminate all of its 17 million mink, saying a mutated coronavirus strain could move to humans and evade future COVID-19 vaccines.

The U.S. states of Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan — where the coronavirus has killed mink — said they do not plan to cull animals and are monitoring the situation in Denmark.

“We believe that quarantining affected mink farms in addition to implementing stringent biosecurity measures will succeed in controlling SARS-CoV-2 at these locations,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Reuters on Tuesday.

USDA said it is working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state officials and the mink industry to test and monitor infected farms.

The U.S. has 359,850 mink bred to produce babies, known as kits, and produced 2.7 million pelts last year. Wisconsin is the largest mink-producing state, followed by Utah.

Sick mink in Wisconsin and Utah were exposed to people with probable or confirmed COVID-19 cases, the USDA said. In Michigan it is still unknown if the mink were infected by humans, according to the agency.

In Utah, the first U.S. state to confirm mink infections in August, about 10,700 mink have died on nine farms, said Dean Taylor, state veterinarian.

“On all nine, everything is still suggesting a one-way travel from people to the minks,” he said. Coronavirus testing has been done on mink that die and randomly on the affected farms, Taylor said. Like people, some mink are asymptomatic or mildly affected, he said.

The CDC said it was supporting states’ investigations into sick mink, including testing of animals and people.

“These investigations will help us to learn more about the transmission dynamics between mink, other animals around the farms and people,” the CDC said. “Currently, there is no evidence that animals play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to people.”

Coronavirus is thought to have first jumped from animals to humans in China, possibly via bats or another animal at a food market in Wuhan, although many outstanding questions remain.

In Wisconsin, about 5,000 mink have died on two farms, state veterinarian Darlene Konkle said.

One farm is composting the dead mink to dispose of the carcasses without spreading the virus, Konkle said. Authorities are working with the second farm to determine how to dispose of the mink, and dead animals are being kept in a metal container in the meantime, she said.

“They are basically in a metal container, a roll-off type container, that is sealed off at this point,” Konkle said.

Michigan declined to disclose how many mink have died, citing privacy rules.

U.S. authorities are urging farmers to wear protective gear like masks and gloves when handling mink to avoid infecting the animals.

State officials said they are working with USDA to determine whether farmers can sell the pelts of infected mink. The pelts are used to make fur coats and other items.

“It’s our desire and certainly the owners’ desire to be able to use those pelts,” Konkle said.

The coronavirus has also infected cats, dogs, a lion and a tiger, according to USDA. Experts say mink appear to be the most susceptible animal so far.

“Whatever we learn about mink is going to help understand the virus across species,” Taylor said. “It’s going to give us a better response to people to stop this pandemic.”

Canada, at the end of 2018, was home to 98 mink farms, mainly in Nova Scotia and Ontario, down from 237 in 2014, according to Statistics Canada.

Canada’s mink farms as of Jan. 1, 2018 included an estimated 500,600 mink in total, down from 861,500 four years earlier, StatsCan said.

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago; additional reporting by Carl O’Donnell in New York. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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