Never mind where the Olympic torch is during its troubled round-the-world trek toward the Beijing summer Olympics.
Where’s the Canadian beef when those games open?
It likely will not be in Beijing, as it turns out.
Canada’s beef industry has been hoping its products could be shipped to China for Canadian athletes performing in the summer Olympics.
But Canada has a problem.
Canadian beef exports are still banned from China because of BSE.
The Canadian Beef Export Federation says an exception for Olympic athletes would be an important breakthrough for the product.
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“Not only would this bring some welcome publicity to our beef in Canada but it would encourage our Canadian government to engage their Chinese counterparts and put access for Canadian beef back on the table, if just in this somewhat symbolic way,” said CBEF international programs vice-president Chenier La Salle.
It could create a precedent, however small, for the Canadian product entering China.
The United States has won Chinese approval to allow U.S. beef into the games site for American athletes, according to the CBEF.
However, there has been frustration with the lack of Canadian government action on the file.
Recently, the director of technical services for CBEF said the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not made the pitch necessary to convince China to make an exception.
“We have been asking CFIA to give us an update on what they have been doing on this file, but I don’t think anything has happened,” Mauricio Arcila said from Calgary. “The Olympics are coming up fast but I don’t see CFIA getting us access to China in time for this year.”
However, Agriculture Canada has agreed to assign the file to a senior bureaucrat who said she has made early contacts.
“I have asked our embassy to look into that,” said Kathryn McKinley, acting director of Agriculture Canada’s eastern hemisphere division, although she admitted convincing the Chinese to make an exception will not be easy.
Among other things, the Chinese would be worried scraps from the Canadian Olympic village would end up in Chinese animal feed.
“I’m not overly optimistic,” she said.
“It’s not as good as 50-50 but we will try to talk to the Chinese.”
At Chicken Farmers of Canada, communications manager Lisa Bishop-Spencer said efforts to get chicken to Olympic athletes are at a “very early stage” but insisted access is not being denied because of hormones fed to Canadian chickens. Rather, it is because of a border closing after a single Saskatchewan farm reported avian influenza last year.
“We do not do that (hormones) and so it is important for consumers to know that,” she said.
“But it (winning approval to supply chicken products to Canadian athletes in Beijing) is very interesting for us and so we are looking into it.”
In March at the CBEF annual meeting, president Ted Haney said a deal will require a government commitment to press the issue and quickly.
Haney said the move toward feeding home-grown meat to athletes in China this summer started after the Americans tested chicken from a Beijing store. They concluded that an Olympic athlete consuming one meal of that chicken could have failed an Olympic hormone test.
