Farmscape for May1, 2013

The Manager of PigTrace Canada is confident the introduction of swine traceability will provide Canada's pork producers a range of management and marketing advantages.
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 and targeting January 1, 2014 as the official start date for mandatory reporting.
Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says the database that will accommodate mandatory reporting is now operational and by June the distribution of instruction booklets to producers across Canada will begin.

Clip-Jeff Clark-Canadian Pork Council:
Traceability for the livestock sector has a lot of value, first and foremost for emergency management.
That's a foreign animal disease or even a production disease.
Another is food safety issues.
If there's issues found at the plants, if there's a meat contamination issue or drug residue issue or what have you we can actually identify where that came from.
We can get in touch with the producer or producers who have had an issue and that way we can really reinforce supply chain confidence.
It doesn't help our industry to have an issue go unidentified.
It gives our abattoirs, some of them are U.S. based abattoirs, it gives them some concerns over the quality of our products.
It really allows us to build up supply chain confidence, source verification, be able to give some assurances of what our product is, whether it's a meat or live animal product and should there be a crisis event such as a foreign animal disease outbreak we can really contain and eradicate the disease as quickly as possible.

For more information on Canada's swine traceability systems visit the PigTrace Canada web site and PigTrace.Ca.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council