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Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

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Chinese criminal gangs are spreading rumors about the African swine fever to scare farmers into selling pigs for cheaper, according to magazine China Comment.

The healthy animals are sometimes smuggled across provinces and resold at a higher price, the investigative report said. In some cases, drones would be used to drop infected feed into farms in a bid to buy pigs for cheap.

The criminals would sometimes transport animals or meat to other parts of China where prices are higher to profit from arbitraging the difference across provinces. Others are forging quarantine certificates. Moving livestock or pork across provinces is banned as authorities try to prevent the disease from spreading.

With the outbreak of the African swine fever, China has been grappling with a surge in the price of pork, a staple in the local diet. The disease, for which there is no approved vaccine, can be fatal for pigs but doesn’t affect human health.

Smugglers have also bribed inspectors to look away from their illegal practices, China Comment wrote. In Yunnan province, about 10,000 pigs including some diseased ones were intercepted before they were to be transported elsewhere, while police suspected a gang of smuggling 4,000 pigs in a single day, the report said.

Wholesale pork prices have more than doubled this year, according to data from China’s Ministry of Commerce, fueling the highest annual consumer inflation rate in seven years. An epidemic of African swine fever has led to the death of millions of pigs.

— With assistance by Dong Lyu