You need to regulate and enforce the distribution chain at all levels, from the farms to the markets.
Wildlife and exotic animals trade need to be banned for both health and environmental reasons.
Wildlife trade has been banned for years, pretty much all the exotic meats on sale in China are either farmed, or smuggled in from abroad.
Banning farming exotic meats without dealing with demand will just drive the farms underground and/or result in more smuggling. Either way it’s only going to make the hygiene situation worse not better.
Many overseas Chinese gets overly sensitive about things like wet markets because the western MSM loves to raise them as a ‘reminder’ of how ‘backwards’ and ‘uncivilised’ China is, and they hold the naive belief that banning such practices will somehow elevate their own status in the eyes of the foreign people they live and deal with on a daily basis.
Unfortunately I have a news flash for you, even if you ban wet markets and exotic meats today, the western MSM will pick another cultural difference and declare that ‘backwards and uncouth’ and use that fresh new stick to bash China and Chinese people with.
To try to appease the western MSM is a fools game that you will never win.
Just look at Japan and South Korea. They have transformed massively culturally to align with western tastes and sensitivities, and there is zero political pressure for the western MSM to bash them, but everyone now and then the western MSM still like to run stories trashing them for cultural traditions they find distasteful like whale hunting or eating dog meat.
The focus on how to minimise the risk of future pandemics shouldn’t be driven by what the western MSM finds most distasteful, but rather on what the true root causes and highest risk factors as well as most effective mitigation strategies are.
The key risk factor for disease transmissions is having live large numbers of animals being kept and sold in urban population centers. You cannot have effective food safety standard processes in place in that case, and if there is an outbreak you have almost zero window to spot it and stop it reaching the general population.
So it should be all live animal sales to the general public that needs to be banned, not just exotic animals.
We live in the real world, and know that merely banning something doesn’t magically stop people from wanting and supplying it. So banning exotic meats is at best a pointless PR move, and at worst a totally counter productive step in limiting the risks of future pandemics.
In terms of food hygiene standards, farmed animals are safest because you can control every aspect of their lives. That means you want to expand exotic meat production with big farms. That will flood the market and drive prices down. That will both help consolidate the market by driving out small farms who tend to be the worst offenders in terms of poor hygiene and animal welfare; and also make poaching and smuggling pointless, thereby eliminating the key risk factors.