Contribution short abstract:

In post-socialist Serbia, the outbreak of African Swine Fever in 2021 could not be contained, largely owing to clashing perspectives over the appropriate temporalities of sustainability and allocation of responsibility between game managers, veterinarians and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Contribution long abstract:

Since 2007, African Swine Fever (ASF), a deadly epidemic affecting domestic and wild pigs, spread across Eurasia. One (largely ineffective) modality of veterinarization adopted in Poland since 2014 has been driven hunts on wild boar. By 2017 ASF reached the Czech Republic from Poland in a “leap” of several hundred kilometers, and concerted veterinary-state efforts temporarily eradicated it through double-fenced zoning, shooting boar outside the core zone (Broz et al. 2021). Both modalities worked by sacrificing sick and healthy wild boar – and small-holders’ domestic pigs – to protect seemingly “more sustainable” high-finance, high-biosecurity industrial piggeries. When the first outbreak occurred in wild boar in Serbia in the National Park Đerdap (NP) on the Danube in 2021, the local professionals were disunited. The NP’s game manager, a veterinary by training, leaned towards the Czech modality but was not a member of the governing party and overruled. Instead, the representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture saw fencing the area as too expensive and enrolling private veterinaries in intensive monitoring of domestic pigs as inopportune. Instead, the Polish approach was adapted. Despite otherwise favorable conditions – the natural barriers of the Danube to the North and steep mountains to the West – the virus could not be contained and quickly entered the domestic pig herd. Serbian pork production declined by 20 percent. The case study exemplarily shows how veterinary worlds depend on spatio-temporally situated negotiations over which “sustainability” modality to adopt and how to translate it in multispecies relations across scales.