Within two years, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency wants to make a food safety system mandatory in all federally registered meat and poultry processing plants, according to the agency’s five-year corporate plan.
The CFIA is within months of publishing a regulatory amendment to make Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point systems a requirement in these plants by 2004.
CFIA official Teresa Iuliano said June 27 most federal meat plants already have voluntarily adopted the standard. For the rest, the agency wants a rule that forces compliance.
“There will be a phase-in period, probably a year,” she said.
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The corporate plan published in late June noted that HACCP is already mandatory in fish and seafood processing plants and 71 percent of registered federal meat plants have implemented or are implementing the system voluntarily.
“Over the next five years, the agency will, in consultation with stakeholders, explore the expansion of HACCP-based systems to other federally regulated food sectors,” the report said.
It offered a glimpse of an agency that faces an expanding workload with a fixed budget and a looming personnel problem as one-quarter of its professional veterinarians, scientists and inspectors reach retirement age during the next five years.
“There will be challenges,” Iuliano said when asked if agency resources will be stretched.
“Stretched or not, we have to make sure our resources are put where they are needed and used to the best that they can.”
The corporate plan projects CFIA federal funding at about $474 million annually for the next five years, including a $50 million injection to the base budget announced by the government last winter.
In the aftermath of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis, politicians have been promising increased surveillance, inspections and monitoring by CFIA of imports, exports and domestic food processing. All that will require more CFIA effort and resources.
But even before the BSE crisis, the agency noted several funding, workload and staffing challenges:
“While this trade has benefits for consumers and the economy, it also increases the risk that unsafe food, foreign pests or diseases might enter Canada through shipments of imported goods.”
“Modernizing existing legislation will allow the CFIA to proceed to the next step, which will be to review its regulatory base and propose new regulations where required,” the report said.
That work is in the early stages, Iuliano added.
