New York Times - April 19, 1997

By PATRICK E. TYLER

TAIPEI, Taiwan If truth is the first casualty of war, trust must be the second, especially between old enemies like mainland China and Taiwan. To prove it, plenty of Taiwanese apparently suspect that the epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease now ravaging their pork industry could have been an act of economic sabotage by China.

"A lot of people here have been saying they believe the mainland sent this disease over here deliberately," said Shen Yi, a radio talk show host.

Was it just a coincidence, she asked, that the outbreak began at about the time the Dalai Lama visited? Beijing views the exiled spiritual leader as a separatist promoting Tibetan independence from China, just as it accuses Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, of promoting Taiwan's independence.

When two adversaries have spent so much time in the last 50 years eyeball to eyeball from armed ramparts on either side of the Taiwan Strait, it is no surprise that the arrival of disaster on Taiwan's shores has incited some dark thoughts.

Tens of thousands of Taiwanese pig farmers are looking for someone to blame for the billions of dollars' worth of devastation caused by the outbreak, which is leading to the greatest animal slaughter on the planet since "mad cow" disease struck Britain.

So far, more than 1.5 million of Taiwan's 14 million pigs have been destroyed, and more than 1 million more are scheduled for execution. Some experts are guessing that half or more of Taiwan's pig population will be wiped out by the plague, which could take a year or two to arrest fully. The disease is very contagious and deadly to livestock but harmless to humans.

The industry, which generates $3.5 billion a year in business, much of it for supplying Japan's voracious appetite for pork, has ground to a halt, endangering the jobs of 100,000 workers raising hogs and 600,000 in related industries.

Last year the Japanese market bought the meat from 6 million pigs in Taiwan, representing 95 percent of the island's pork exports. But Tokyo froze all shipments last month, and Singapore and South Korea followed suit.

"It is just devastating," said Wesley Yu, a local assemblyman in southern Taiwan's largest city, Kaohsiung. "And the government has handled things poorly. But no one will lose their job. In Taiwan culture, no one likes to admit that they made a mistake."

Opposition legislators accuse the government of being unprepared and incompetent in fighting the viral onslaught. A month into the crisis, Taiwan's agricultural bureaus have failed to get adequate supplies of vaccines to farmers, even though vaccines are abundant in international markets.

Some opposition politicians say the government's handling of the crisis will be a factor in crucial local elections later this year. In those elections, candidates who forsake claims to the mainland could seize a majority of municipal and county offices.

Lee, worried that the blame might settle on the shoulders of his governing Nationalist Party, went before the television cameras last week to munch on a feast of pig knuckles and declare, "Eating pork is healthy and safe."

But his constituents weren't buying. Pork prices have declined more than 60 percent since the epidemic broke out.

In an unsubtle attempt to point the finger, Lee said Taiwan would have to do a much better job stopping the smuggling of pigs from China, as if that were the only place that the contamination could have come from. Malaysia and the Philippines have also had hoof-and-mouth outbreaks of late.

Many Taiwanese, as well as some prominent experts, apparently believe that the most likely source of the hoof-and-mouth plague was across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait. Mainland pigs are banned from Taiwan because China refuses to comply with international reporting standards on the incidence of hoof-and-mouth disease, and rumors of epidemics in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces have reached here.

The mainland has been silent, except in its offer to sell vaccines at a good profit to its beleaguered neighbor. But the quality of mainland vaccines is suspect.

It is certainly true that Taiwanese and Chinese smugglers have been caught plying the strait in the dead of night with loads of piglets destined for the Taiwan market, where they can bring double the price they fetch on the mainland. One of those boats could well have landed a Trojan pig.