Livestock producers will have new costs to swallow beginning this month for antibiotic screening tests conducted when animals are shipped for slaughter.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency used to pay the tab for the in-plant monitoring known as the STOP test.
Government belt-tightening and shrinking budgets are blamed for the new cost recovery fee being passed onto farmers.
It’s part of the federal government’s second phase of a cost recovery initiative, according to Mark Gaetz, with the CFIA in Ottawa.
And while the $30 STOP test fee will be billed to the plant, the industry is expecting producers will end up paying, according to a spokesperson with Manitoba Pork.
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“Right off the bat the plant is going to say we don’t want the carcass, it’s not ours,” said Rick Mason.
“They’ll say if you want to pay, we’ll let CFIA test. If you don’t want to pay, it goes into dog food. Simple as that.”
Suspicious carcasses tested
Under the new system, if an animal looks suspect, for example found with fresh injection marks or has an infection that likely resulted from a recent injection, the STOP test will be administered post-mortem.
“We would charge for that because they’re a violator and they should pay the cost of that,” said Laura Weir, project manager of meat production for the CFIA in Winnipeg.
“We charge the plant because we don’t have anybody else we can charge. We can’t get back to the producer, so it’s up to the plant if they want to charge it back to the producer.”
There is no fee for random antibiotic residue testing that is part of the national screening program, Weir said, adding there has to be reasonable grounds for an inspector to suspect antibiotic residue may be present to call for the STOP test.
Then, because the test doesn’t indicate the specific antibiotic involved, samples must be sent to a lab for further analysis to determine which medicine triggered the positive reading.
The fee for that test ranges from $22 to $364. Costs will also be recovered for the SOS test, which indicates presence of specific antibiotics.
If an animal is tested randomly and comes out positive after lab analysis, the producer is asked to ship five more animals for testing. If they are clean, the producer can resume marketing.
If not, the $14.65 fee is charged per test and the producer must stop marketing hogs until the animals test clean.
It’s another case where the plants will likely pass the cost to the producer, Weir said.
Mason said the best way for producers to avoid the new costs is to follow drug withdrawal times and hold back animals that look sick and could catch the attention of meat inspectors.
Gaetz said food safety guarantees are critical to international markets.
“The industry is ready to push out unscrupulous producers. An outbreak doesn’t just impact on that individual, but on the whole industry.”
He said about 14,000 STOP tests are done annually at federally inspected plants in Canada.
