GUELPH, Ont. – The man running Ontario’s drive to build a comprehensive traceability system for provincial farm products says the federal-provincial promise of a mandatory national system for animals by 2011 is unrealistic.
Brian Sterling, chief executive officer of the not-for-profit producer-directed corporation OnTrace Agrifood Traceability, said progress is being made after four years of work in Ontario, but all the pieces cannot be in place by 2011.
Meanwhile, other provinces have barely started.
“I would say it would be a real challenge to bring all of this to fruition in the next 12 months,” he said.
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“I think in Ontario the premises identification could be largely done, but the other pieces would still be a work in progress.”
In 2005, the provincial government decided a comprehensive premise registry was needed as the first building block for a traceability system that would allow an efficient response to a food system emergency.
It kick-started the process with a $10 million grant to be administered by a coalition of provincial farm groups.
OnTrace was set up in 2006 to lead the effort.
Sterling said the Ontario approach is unique in Canada.
Premise registration is voluntary for farmers. Instead, the program uses publicly available provincial land records, municipal property assessment records and membership data from farm groups to validate information obtained from the other two sources about the number and nature of Ontario farms.
Building the OnTrace database began with four county pilot projects. With the co-operation from producer groups, they produced results and it expanded to a provincial program.
“There are 220,000 agriculture properties in Ontario and I would say we’re about 25 percent complete,” Sterling said.
“I think my board would say we have the 50,000 or 60,000 that matter most.”
He said the Ontario project differs from other provinces because it is registering all agricultural premises and not just animal agriculture. It also includes animal and product identification that is the responsibility of the agricultural industry and a system for tracking product or animal movement that OnTrace is developing.
Rather than adopting a mandatory movement reporting system patterned on the Quebec model of command and control, the Ontario movement tracking system will also be voluntary, based on an electronic data-retrieving system that will be able to tap into the product movement records that all the links in the food chain keep as part of their business, as long as they agree.
“I call the system we are working on a virtual lock box that will not store data but will be able to quickly access it if needed,” Sterling said.
“System players will allow access to their data about specific product movement if it is needed for, say, a recall, but the data will be confidential, accessible only to those who need it and are authorized to receive it.”
While work continues on constructing the movement traceability system, the first chore is to continue building the premises database.
Sterling said Quebec, Manitoba and Alberta have launched mandatory reporting programs.
Ontario opted to try the voluntary approach, allowing farmers to register their properties with a description of present-day farming activities but not forcing it.
Even with that, he ran into farmer hostility about privacy and intrusiveness.
“My answer was that we are registering premises and not people and this property information is already publicly available.”
However, Sterling concedes the voluntary approach likely means there will never be 100 percent compliance.
“Voluntarily, probably not,” he said.
“But traceability is not going to go away and having premises identification is fundamental, so I can see someday the federal government making premises ID mandatory and making that the provincial responsibility in a national traceability system.”
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