3.1 Descriptive analysis of pig movements in Ecuador
The Ecuadorian pig chain is organised into two production structures: traditional producers (farms, traders, and markets) and industrial producers (industrial). Premises are classified as farms: traditional producers, mainly backyards (subsistence); traders: individuals who buy/sell animals on the same day and/or groups of animals for one or two days, transporting and selling them to final destinations such as abattoirs, markets and farms; industrials: industrial pork producing companies; markets: licenced facilities where live pig are marketed (Ecuador’s Official Record, 2016). Live animal markets represent vestiges of indigenous tradition, marketing and culture, acting mainly in the highland Andean region (Benitez and Sanchez, 2001).
The dataset contained 9,904,714 pigs involved in 1,190,991 movements, geographically distributed in 945 (92%) of the 1,032 Ecuadorian parishes. The movement dataset contained domestic movements and included 721 imported animals from Chile, Canada and the United States (for breeding purposes from industrial farms). The number of movements analysed averaged 396,997 per year. In the study period, there was an increase in the number of movements, pigs and premises of 53.23%, 32.38% and 51.32%, respectively. Considering the categories of premises, there was an increase of 53% farms, 46% traders, 4% abattoirs, 8% industrial markets, and 15% markets. Pig producers used their individual web accounts to issue 94.72% of the movement certificates in the study period, compared to 9.43% in 2015.
The annual average proportion between premises types was from farms to markets (26.66%), followed by farms to abattoirs (23.33%). The less frequent were from industrial to markets (0.17%) and between markets (0.28%). Markets as origins or destinations accounted for 55.37% of the movements (Table 2). Only 5% of the premises had geographical coordinates, using instead the centroid of their parish, the median distance of the movements was 11 km. The number of movements for each study year is available in SI1.
Table 2. Average number of movements and animals by origin, destination and distance grouped by type of premises in Ecuador (2017-2019).