The Canadian Pork Council reports, despite the challenges, the majority of Canadian swine producers have been supportive of efforts to implement a national swine traceability system for hogs.
Planned amendments to the federal Health of Animals Regulations to accommodate swine traceability are expected to take effect by late 2010 or early 2011.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says the biggest change is the requirement for anyone housing or moving swine to report key movement information within 48 hours of departure or reception of animals.
There’s been segments of traceability applying to other commodity groups in Canada such as cattle and bison.
Now it’s being amended to bring in swine traceability in full effect including the movement reporting and identification portions of traceability.
For the most part I’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the support.
Traceability has been talked about for a long long time.
I think we’ve addressed questions over the years and for the most producers and stakeholders seem to be in a position where, once we’re ready to go, let them know and they’ll come on line.
Now of course we do have some push-back and concerns and we’re addressing those in the best way we can to make this an easy system, easy to report information.
I think the biggest challenge is just the practicality of actually reporting movement information.
Some of the other challenges that we do hear about are privacy of information.
We’ve worked very closely with CFIA as well as our own service provider Agri-Trace International based out of Montreal to put in very strong security measures so producers can view their own information and CFIA can view movement information in the event of an emergency.
Clark expects the amended Health of Animals Regulations to be published in Canada Gazzette-1 sometime this fall then, following a 30 day public comment period and any necessary changes they’ll be published in Canada Gazzette-2 where they’ll become Canadian law.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
