Farmscape for July 12, 2006  (Episode 2192)

The President of the US based National Pork Producers Council says efforts to develop animal identification and taceability systems must remain animal health focused to avoid any perception of protectionism.

Foreign animal disease and the ability to trace animals from the packing plant to their farm of origin was a key topic when representatives of the Canadian, American and Mexican pork industries met in May in San Francisco for trilateral meetings and the issue was discussed again last week as a US delegation traveled to Winnipeg for the annual meeting of the Canadian Pork Council.

National Pork Producers Council president Joy Philippi notes, as the three countries work to develop their own systems, there is a recognition of the need for a coordinated animal health focused approach.

Clip-Joy Philippi-National Pork Producers Council 

In a lot of ways people have kind of confused the issue of traceability, animal ID, with animal health driven versus market driven.

Our focus in the US is animal health driven and the focus of the conversations we've had with the other countries, animal health driven.

We need to have a healthy North American swine herd and we have to protect that health.

This is the best way that we can see to do that.

I believe the producers are totally behind doing this for animal health purposes.

They have a little bit more issue with this when we talk about it in marketing.

If we look at the three countries together, we just can not create a system that looks protectionist from one country to another.

Trade is an important thing to all three countries and if one country would set up standards that would make it difficult for trading to happen as it has been it could create an issue that none of us want to have and that being the possibility of discontinued trade issues just because we wanted to protect our herd.

Philippi says, as ID and traceability systems are developed, it's important to maintain dialogue and ensure one country doesn't adopt standards that the others will have trouble accepting.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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