The Canadian Pork Council is encouraging pork producers to consider the many benefits of complying with new regulations requiring the reporting of movements of live hogs.
Under changes to Canada’s Health of Animals Regulation, that took effect July 1, 2014, the reporting of movements of live swine in Canada become mandatory.
The shipper and the receiver of pigs must report the source and destination of the load of animals, the license plate number of the truck that moved them, the date and time they were loaded, the number of animals and any official animal identification numbers on them to the PigTrace Canada database within seven days.
Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, reports over 8,000 premises across Canada are now registered and about 65 percent of those are regularly reporting.
It’s the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that’s responsible for enforcement and that comes down to the CFIA inspectors.
There’s about probably 450 inspectors across Canada so enforcement is going to vary because you have different people enforcing it and on top of that we have four CFIA regions in Canada so the regional enforcement differs a little bit.
For the most part though CFIA has taken an educational kind of encouraging approach.
It is a law but, for the most part, inspectors have been encouraging.
We have had some very strict inspectors out there.
In terms of fines, there’s no fines right now for the program.
We do expect the federal government to bring in a fine structure later in 2015 so right now it’s really word of mouth.
People can get an official letter of noncompliance if there’s a problem but that’s where we are right now.
Once the fine structure becomes public, the Canadian pork Council and the provincial pork organization will communicate that information broadly.
Clark encourages people to look at the benefits.
He notes data from the program has already been used for trace backs, the electronic tags work with electronic sow feeding systems, PigTrace tags are less than half the cost of other tags on the market and there are many other benefits.
