Canadian livestock groups are waiting for the federal government to approve creation of a national livestock premises registry, something they say is overdue.
A request for authority to create a mandatory registry was made in April, but Ottawa has not given its approval, said Dennis McKerracher, an Alberta hog producer and vice-president of the Canadian Livestock Identification Agency.
“We will be continuing to let government know how important a mandatory premises registry is,” McKerracher said.
“We’ve got to know where the animals are and we’ve got to know where they’ve gone to or we can’t do any traceability or tracking.”
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The registry would list the location of premises across Canada that carry livestock. Farms would be included, and places such as livestock assembly yards would also be covered.
McKerracher said a mandatory livestock premises registry is an essential part of being able to trace animals back to their herds of origin in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak.
Livestock identification programs can help in the event that a traceback is needed, but the information gathered for those ID programs does not necessarily include the geographic location of each livestock premises.
That gap leaves livestock producers in Canada vulnerable, McKerracher said, and it is a concern to countries importing products like pork from Canada. Those trading partners want assurances that a disease outbreak could be dealt with swiftly and effectively so their supplies of products such as meat would not be curtailed for too long.
And for many of Canada’s trading partners, a voluntary farm premises registration would not be enough to provide the assurances they need.
“When you just have a voluntary system it’s very difficult if not impossible to sell that proposal to your trading partners,” McKerracher said.
He noted that the federal government wants traceability for 80 percent of Canadian livestock by 2008. A national premises registration would be an important part of meeting that target, he said.
Meanwhile, McKerracher also drew attention to the need to establish surveillance zones in Canada. There has been talk for years of establishing those zones but none are yet in place.
Surveillance zones are designed to divide the country into regions that are recognized by Canada’s trading partners. In the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak, exports from unaffected zones in Canada could resume, provided it could be shown that the disease was confined and measures were in place to prevent its spread to other zones within the country.
McKerracher would like to begin with two surveillance zones, one for Western Canada and the other extending from Ontario eastward.
