The manager of PigTrace Canada is encouraging pork producers to begin preparing now for the introduction of mandatory reporting of swine movements within Canada.
Pig Trace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, is the official swine traceability program for the Canadian swine industry.
To accommodate swine traceability, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is revising Canada’s Health of Animals Regulation to, for the first time, require the reporting of all movements of pigs.
PigTrace Canada manager Jeff Clark told those on hand last week in Winnipeg for Manitoba Swine Seminar 2013, in response to public comments, CFIA has made some changes to the draft regulation.
The Health of Animals regulation was published for public comment in the summer of 2012.
Myself, through the Canadian pork Council as well as working with a lot of industry people, put in a series of comments back on the regulation.
There was some things that needed to be addressed or clarified.
The CFIA has been very good since then to address virtually all of the comments.
They’ve made some changes to the regs.
The major one would be, we’ve relaxed the reporting period from 48 hours to seven days.
Mind you our target for reporting is to be as close to real time as possible but we feel seven days gives us a little bit of flexibility to get the program up and running.
The other major part of the regulations is we’ve actually named a launch date, coming into force date and right now CFIA is proposing January 1, 2014 so this year, 2013 is a critical year to get the program off the ground, do some voluntary reporting with as many people within the industry as possible and get people ready for a mandatory program come 2014.
Clark says the PigTrace database has been complete for quite some time, has undergone extensive testing and in Manitoba we’re poised to start receiving movement reporting within the next week or so.
For more on Canada’s swine traceability system visit pigtrace.ca.
