Preventing African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreaks require an active involvement of pig growers as they are in the frontline of detection, notification, and the application of strict biosecurity measures. The Eastern Visayas (Region VIII) in Central Philippines is still free of ASF but the risk can be remarkable given the high volume of pigs that enter in this region as a market hub to large pig producers both coming from Luzon (north) and Mindanao (south). This study was conducted to better understand the readiness and biosecurity practices of smallholder pig farmers who comprise most of the pig growers in the City of Baybay, Leyte. Using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) technique of data from 350 pig farmer-respondents, our study found several areas in pig raising activities that need to be highlighted. While pig farmers were generally ...

Preventing African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreaks require an active involvement of pig growers as they are in the frontline of detection, notification, and the application of strict biosecurity measures. The Eastern Visayas (Region VIII) in Central Philippines is still free of ASF but the risk can be remarkable given the high volume of pigs that enter in this region as a market hub to large pig producers both coming from Luzon (north) and Mindanao (south). This study was conducted to better understand the readiness and biosecurity practices of smallholder pig farmers who comprise most of the pig growers in the City of Baybay, Leyte. Using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) technique of data from 350 pig farmer-respondents, our study found several areas in pig raising activities that need to be highlighted. While pig farmers were generally ...

The prevailing wet climate in the western Amazon is not favorable to the natural occurrence of fires. Nevertheless, the current process of clearing of humid forests for agriculture and cattle ranching has increased the vulnerability of the region to the spread of fires. Using meteorological stations precipitation and the Moderate Resolution Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Active-Fires (AF) during 2000-2009, we show that fire anomalies vary closely with July-August-September (JAS) precipitation variability as measured by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The precipitation variability is, in turn, greatly determined by sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the North Tropical Atlantic (NTA). We develop a linear regression model to relate local fire activity to an index of the NTA-SST. By using seasonal forecasts of SST from a coupled model, we are able to predict anomalous JAS fire...