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Judy Thompson
- Canadian Food Inspection Agency |
| Farmscape for April 29, 2004 (Episode 1504)
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says, despite some concerns, feed industry stakeholders clearly recognize the need for a national regulatory structure for dealing with medicated feeds.
A series of town hall meetings to outline proposed regulations for the manufacture of medicated livestock feeds in Canada made stops this week in Portage La Prairie and Saskatoon.
The regulations are intended to establish minimum standards for the manufacture of medicated feeds for food producing animals and are expected to be implemented early in the new year.
CFIA Feed Evaluation Coordinator Judy Thompson says, while stakeholders aren't ecstatic about the new rules, feedback is general positive.
Clip-Judy Thompson-Canadian Food Inspection Agency
The industry groups that are involved in this area have been working over the last five or six years to develop voluntary quality assurance programs that deal with food safety and feed safety aspects and medication is a big part of that.
They're pretty well informed as to what the issues are and they already have controls in place so they look at this, in some ways, as being a complimentary program for the people that aren't currently registered on a voluntary program to bring everybody in the industry into line.
I think there's a general sense that these regulations are a good thing and it's really the specific way that we're going to apply them that's the issue.
We're not naive enough at the agency to believe that people are looking for more rules but the industry, at some level, considers there's an inevitability to some type of regulation and they're just trying to make sure that the regulatory structure is as practical and reasonable as possible.
Thompson says key producer concerns revolve around how regulatory inspections will be coordinated with industry quality assurance programs without duplicating efforts or increasing costs and with the number of samples that must be tested.
She says commercial industry concerns tend to centre on sequence and flushing guidelines and the ability to manage carryovers of medication from one batch to another in a way that meets regulatory requirements.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council |
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| Keywords: food safety |
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© Wonderworks Canada
2004 |
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