The manager of PigTrace Canada says the active promotion of the use of new tools designed to accommodate the mandatory reporting of pig movements in Canada will begin early in the new year.
To accommodate swine traceability the federal government is expected to formally publish regulatory amendments to the Health of Animals Regulation this fall and it is expected that July 1, 2014 will be the official coming into force date where movement reporting will become mandatory.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says movement information will include the source or destination of the load of animals, the license plate number of the truck, the date and time animals were loaded, the number of animals and any official animal identification numbers on them.
We’ve finished completing all of our movement reporting tools.
We will be issuing all of our producers and pork value chain people such as abattoirs and assembly yards their own log-in accounts and passwords so they can log into the system.
I can set producers up today.
I can set up their accounts but nationally I’m targeting January 2014 as the day where we will really start to push the program.
We want to give the industry a lot of time ahead of the regulation to learn how to do the program.
We have some information and education kits ready to go out to the industry.
That will go with instructions on how to use the different movement reporting tools.
I expect to send them out in January and then start to proactively encourage industry to start reporting movements to PigTrace.
Clark notes, once movement reporting becomes mandatory, movement information will need to be reported within seven days although the hope is to get it as close to real time as possible.
He says the quicker the information is reported the more helpful it will be when responding to foreign animal disease issues or food safety issues.
