Brest (AFP)

Everything is done for a VIP trip. A thousand pigs, handpicked for their reproductive performance, flew Tuesday at the end of the day from Brest to China, a country hard hit in 2019 by African swine fever.

"We are on Formula 1 of French genetics," says Laurent Poussart, managing director of Celtic Freight Consulting, the company in charge of the logistics of this unusual expedition.

In total, between Tuesday and Wednesday, 2,000 breeding pigs will leave the Breton airport, which since 2017 has been developing flights of live animals and in particular horses to Japan, bound for Taiyuan Wusu, in the Chinese province of Schanxi.

For these exceptional animals, such an operation, on the initiative of the company specializing in porcine genetics Axiom, requires a lot of precautions.

After being unloaded from the trucks which transported them from Meneac, in Morbihan, where they were in quarantine, the pigs were parked in boxes installed in a large hangar. "They are in the VIP lounge before taking the plane," laughs Laurent Poussart.

"Given the financial stakes and the value of these animals, we have to take good care of them," he said. According to Marie Pushparajalingam, director of development and international strategy for Axiom, depending on the country, the price of these animals is 5 to 10 times higher than that of an animal intended for slaughter.

- "Olympic athletes" -

"These pigs are a bit of athletes leaving for the Olympic Games, they are the best mothers for their maternal qualities and the best dads for their robustness and their growth", she explains.

The pigs aged 15 to 20 weeks and weighing between 50 and 100 kg, the majority of females, were then placed in large perforated wooden boxes. In each case, around thirty pigs were distributed over three levels. It was at the end of the afternoon and under a heavy sky that the animals were loaded aboard a cargo plane B 747-800. Arrival in China is planned after 15 hours of flight and after a stopover in Kazakhstan, a country free from swine fever.

The company plans to send some 10,000 French breeding pigs to China in 2020, and assures that other contracts are already planned for 2021. Until now, it sent between 2,000 and 4,000 per year.

"With swine fever China needs to receive more," said Pushparajalingam.

Because before being struck by the coronavirus, China, the first consuming country but also the leading producer of pork in the world, had to face the ravages of swine fever.

Harmless to humans, this highly contagious viral disease causes hemorrhages that can be fatal in a few days in wild boars and domestic pigs.

Chinese authorities announced in late 2019 that they had lost 50% of their breeding pig herds in this epidemic, or around 500 million pigs, according to a pork market expert.

"It was a disaster for our pigs," said Huan Liu, a veterinarian from the Chinese customs service, who came to check on the animals' good health before they left. "We need a lot of pigs to rebuild our livestock," she says in hesitant English, praising the "great quality of French pigs", as well as the great care taken in preparing their transport.

© 2020 AFP