A hired hand feeds a sow which recently gave birth to a new litter at the Grand Canal Pig Farm in Jiaxing, in China's Zhejiang province.

African swine fever, which has already ravaged pig herds in China and pushed up food prices there, could also drive up inflation in the other emerging markets, according to research firm Capital Economics.

Outbreaks of the disease have been detected not just in China, but also in parts of Southeast Asia, Japan, Poland and Russia.

The Chinese government said in April it had culled more than a million pigs in a bid to control the outbreak, but some experts — such as Rabobank and TS Lombard — estimated that the number of hog culled could be more than 100 million.

"The most obvious channel through which this will impact (emerging markets) is via higher inflation," James Swanston, assistant economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note last week.

"If the disease spreads and increases in severity, it would probably make a notable contribution to inflation in parts of Asia ... and Eastern Europe," he said.

He singled out Taiwan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, Poland and Romania, saying that pork is a relatively large part of the consumer price index basket in those countries — at around 2%. That compares with less than 1% in most other emerging markets, and about 3.5% in China, Swanston wrote.

Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday showed that food prices in the country spiked 7.7% in May compared to a year ago, as pork prices surged 18.2% also in the same period.

The rise in inflation in China "probably has further to run," while consumer prices in the other emerging markets would also be pushed up — by around 0.3 percentage points — if pork inflation were to rise to 15%, according to Capital Economics.

Recent spikes in prices have caused pork inflation in emerging economies to rise by as high as 15%, Swanston wrote.