Starving and needy people overseas may become another victim of Canada’s BSE crisis.
The Mennonite Central Committee is working against the clock to save its mobile meat-canning program, which has until the end of 2005 before it must comply with federal regulations that ban the use of non-permanent meat processing facilities.
“I think the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) is nervous about it,” said MCC aid organizer Ken Reddig about the Dec. 31 deadline.
All meat exported from Canada must be inspected and approved by the CFIA. Since the discovery of BSE-infected animals in Canada, the application of the laws has become stricter, said Richard Arsenault of the CFIA.
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The agency stops short of completely rejecting approval for MCC’s mobile canneries after 2005, but Arsenault said it would be a challenge.
The MCC meat canning drives are well known across the Mennonite areas of the United States, where they began in the 1940s, and have been gaining recognition in Canada. Ontario Mennonites did their first canning in the 1970s and their Manitoba brethren joined them in 1997.
The meat is sent around the world to ease hunger and malnutrition.
“We look at a can of meat as a can of protein,” said Paul Friesen of the MCC.
Canned meat is more than just a different form of nutrition from the grains and pulse crops that most aid shipments consist of, Reddig said.
Many refugee camps are in drought-stricken areas, or in places with unhealthy water supplies. A can of meat can be opened and eaten without having to use the large amounts of water required to cook grains and pulses.
The meat canning drives are supported in many communities, as farmers donate meat, local people donate their labour and local meat plants often offer use of their facilities at a discount.
Last year in Manitoba, more than 40,000 pounds of meat were canned, with more than one million lb. of meat canned by MCC drives across North America.
Reddig remembers the cannings as community events when he was a child in the United States.
“I remember as a little boy in Kansas, my dad would donate a cow,” said Reddig.
Meat would be cooked and then put into glass jars.
The present complication arises from the MCC’s use of mobile trailers for the canning, which it attaches to federally inspected plants. Federal food safety laws are tough, and getting mobile facilities to meet CFIA standards doesn’t look likely, Arsenault said.
The agency has recommended the MCC use a permanent facility at a plant to make it easier to get CFIA approval for the meat.
Reddig said he hopes the MCC can come up with a way to continue with mobile canning and still obtain CFIA approval.
