The Manager of PigTrace Canada reports compliance with regulations requiring the reporting of swine movements is building.
Since July 1, 2014 shippers and receivers of swine have been required to report those movements to PigTrace Canada within seven days. Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, reports compliance is building.
Anyone who has a pig, whether it’s for their own use, their own consumption, anytime a pig is shipped the movement information must be reported to our PigTrace system and that can be either electronically or they can fax or phone it into us.
Custodians have seven days after the movement to report that information to us and in practice we’re finding it’s often same day that people are reporting it to our system but they have seven days.
On the compliance side, I should mention just a few weeks ago we hit one million movements so that’s since July 1, 2014 we’ve had one million shipments reported to us.
On the compliance side it’s hard to really measure against anything. We have marketing statistics from Agriculture Canada and farm registration statistics from Statistics Canada. We can kind of compare numbers there. It’s starting to get close.
The other metric I use is roughly we have about 10,500 locations registered and I often look at how many of them are reporting on a consistent basis and that’s roughly about 7,000 now. We know that not all of our registered locations are in operation right now. There’s empty barns or, in the case of small scale backyard producers, they often maybe have 1 or 2 pigs in the fall that they ship.
I’m constantly impressed by the participation by the pork industry and pork lifestyle in the case of the smaller backyard producers to participate in this program. ~ Jeff Clark – PigTrace Canada
Clark says enforcement has been limited to verbal warnings or letters of con-compliance but a fine structure is expected to be introduced by the end of 2016.
