The Canadian Food Inspection Agency vehemently denies persistent and long-standing accusations from a health advocacy group that Canada imported potentially dangerous animal feed from Europe as recently as 2002.
The Canadian Health Coalition, supported in part by the Canadian Labour Congress, has insisted for years that Canada has imported feed material that could cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
In a recent article that was widely published in newspapers across Canada, coalition researcher Bradford Duplisea said agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief has denied the import allegations.
“Is minister Vanclief lying or is he being misled by his advisers?” asked Duplisea.
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Neither, say some of those advisers from the CFIA.
“We have thoroughly investigated it and we can say we have not imported feeds with specified risk materials,” chief CFIA veterinarian Brian Evans told reporters last week. Specified risk materials means potential BSE-source material from ruminants, such as parts of the nervous system.
Robert Carberry, acting CFIA vice-president for programs, also used an appearance before the House of Commons agriculture committee to deny the allegation.
“We did a full survey from 1990 to the year 2000, and we determined that no products of risk, meat and bone meal products, were fed to Canadian animals from other sources, other than the U.S.A.,” he said.
At the core of the disagreement are Statistics Canada import reports that show significant imports of a broad category of animal products from the European Union, a category that includes blood and bone meal and meat scraps.
“Statistics Canada documentation shows that between 1990-2000, Canada continued to import potentially contaminated blood meal, meat scraps and waste meat from the United Kingdom and European countries,” wrote Duplisea. “Shockingly, over 2.8 million kilograms of this potentially contaminated material was imported after 1996” – the year it was determined that a human brain wasting disease could develop from eating nervous system protein from a BSE cow.
Federal officials insist those allegations are based on a misreading of the import statistics.
The material imported and recorded in those general statistics are animal protein and their products that are used in products as diverse as chocolate and cosmetics. It does not include feed and protein fed to Canadian ruminants.
“We have dealt with this many times before,” said Evans. “These allegations are not true.”
Carberry concurred: “In fact, what was being imported was not any high-risk material through that period from those countries.”
