Farmscape for September 8, 2005  (Episode 1906)

The Canadian Pork Council has put efforts to gain government recognition of its on farm food safety program on hold as it fine tunes the management structure for the program.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has finalized procedures for the second step of its review of Canada's on farm food safety programs and hopes to pilot the process beginning in late October.

Eight national producer organizations, including the Canadian Pork Council, have completed step one of the recognition process and are conceivably ready to move forward.

National Canadian Quality Assurance Coordinator Dawn Lawrence says, rather than moving ahead with the review, CPC will instead focus on improving the management system it has already developed.

Clip-Dawn Lawrence-Canadian Pork Council 

We, as a commodity group, were developing our management system at about the same time that CFIA was developing its criteria document for the administration and implementation of the on farm food safety programs so we have approached things in a little different manner than what CFIA has outlined.

The CQA advisory committee, and this has been approved as well by the Canadian Pork Council Executive, we've decided to implement the management system that we have developed and to make sure that we have it all functioning properly before we go ahead with looking at the GAP analysis.

What we'll want to do is have some results back from CFIA on how things are proceeding with that before we make any decisions, basically to get our feet under us, make sure everything is working properly and then we'll look at a plan for making modifications or whether we want to make the modifications necessary to meet all of the government criteria at this time.

Lawrence says, while CPC will monitor the phase two pilot, it will continue to focus on perfecting its own management system.

She says, once the organization is comfortable with its management system, it will then decide on its role in the federal recognition process.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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