OUTBREAK: HUNGARY APRIL 2025

OUTBREAK: HUNGARY APRIL 2025 ON

After 52 years of being free of this disease, Hungary is facing an outbreak of sticky foot and mouth disease (an extremely contagious illness affecting livestock) in the northwestern corner of the country, right next to the Slovakia-Austria-Hungary border triangle point. This area, BTW, happens to be that part of the country from where largest numbers of citizens of Hungary commute daily to Austria . (The video in the link is in Magyar but you can turn on the subtitles in dozens of languages, including English). Add to that the thousands of citizens of Slovakia who reside on the Hungarian side of the border and commute to Bratislava for work. (Remember: all three countries are part of the Schengen system, so, under normal circumstances, there is no border procedure, you just roll or walk through.) Most train and automobile traffic between Vienna (plus western Europe) and the rest of Hungary cross this area. So, it is reasonable to expect wide ranging cross-border consequences to the epidemic. Slovakia closed sixteen smaller border crossing stations on the border with Hungary so it can focus more thoroughly on those handling bigger traffic. Austria shut down 23 roads crossing from Hungary. The Czech Republic has also introduced some border checking measures, even though it only has borders with Austria and Slovakia, not Hungary.

Affected area: screen shot from the website of the National Office for Food Safety

This corner of Hungary also includes Győr and Mosonmagyaróvár, some of the most industrialized areas of the country, with foreign-owned, export-oriented assembly-line-type production. Giants like Audi, a German owned automobile assembly plant, dominate the economic landscape. Consequently, the area affected by the disease happens to be among the relatively well-to-do areas of the country (behind Budapest of course.) Housing prices in Győr are rumored to be close to the Budapest average.

In response to the outbreak, massive numbers of cattle have been slaughtered, the bodies hauled in some instances to distances as much as 60 kilometers, and buried in select rural areas, easy walking distance from small villages and farmsteads. No humans have been relocated because of the epidemic. Nobody has been told why fields close to their village have been chosen for the burial of the bodies of slaughtered ill animals and why. (For more on the situation, including visuals that give you a general idea of the lay of the land and the thin presence of officialdom, see this report (again, please turn on the subtitles for your preferred language). Drinking water tanks have been brought in as tacit acknowledgment by the authorities that there is imminent danger of contamination of the underground water table. The government imposed perimeter around the dumping grounds is not properly enforced, as shown by the recent release of a video (I will spare you of that) showing the gruesome burial grounds in close-up). A rich fauna of wild animals--many of which are susceptible to the disease, let alone being capable of carrying the virus far away--criss-cross the affected areas.

The government has introduced a credit repayment moratorium for farms affected by the outbreak. That is of course a welcome step but does not solve the immediate cash flow problems of the small-to-midsize farms of the area, specializing in livestock. Nor the more medium-term effects of the loss of livestock.

Experts suggest that Hungary is on the brink of the total collapse of animal husbandry if the virus is not contained within the affected area--a near certainty. Although agriculture as a whole, according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators dataset , appears to be a relatively minor proportion of the country's total value added (it came to 4.7% in 2023)--it is greater than the world mean (4.1%), let alone the EU average (1.65%). In 2023, 28,400 farms were engaged exclusively, and another 15,7 in part, in livestock production, that constitutes just under one-fourth of total agricultural production. While this might not appear to be a particularly dramatic drop in the big picture, there are two questions nobody can answer at this point:

1. How would Hungary's (animal-protein-heavy) food supply be affected by such a calamity?, and
2. What would be the impact of the spread of the disease on European and, indeed, global agriculture?.

OUTBREAK: HUNGARY APRIL 2025 OFF