Canada Leading the Way in Food Traceability
By Amanda Brodhagen, Farms.com
The Canadian government recently announced a mandatory pig traceability system for the pork industry. Traceability systems are already mandatory for Canadian cattle, bison and sheep. The announcement comes in the midst of new regulations sanctioned by the Canadian Food inspection Agency (CFIA) that moves to strengthen Canada’s livestock sector that will require pork producers to keep detailed records on all movements of their swine inventory.
The proposed PigTrace program will protect Canada’s swine industry and will help boost the pork industry’s competitive edge in accessing export markets. The CFIA says that the proposed regulations would build on what’s already in place in other provinces and expand it to a national scale. In 2011 Alberta launched their own swine traceability system with much success.
Food traceability has been one of the key priority areas for the Canadian government and it’s expressed with the introduction of the Safe Food for Canadians Act that works towards modernizing Canada’s food safety system. The federal government wants to capitalize on the opportunity to include food traceability as part of their requirements to enhance food safety and to use it as a marketing tool to export to other countries.
Canadian Pork Council President, Jean-Guy Vincent said that the proposed traceability program would give the Canadian pork industry “an opportunity to improve its market competitiveness.”
The PigTrace system will cost the pork industry $3.18 million per year to administer the program which would include animal identification tags. But if there was a disease outbreak without a traceability system in place, it would cost the industry $6.1 billion in the year of the outbreak alone.
The proposed traceability requirement for the swine industry is now open for public comment until August 13, 2012.