Canadian cattle and hog producers are supporting a plan that would allow the country to be broken into two regions in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak.
A study by an Edmonton consulting firm has suggested that dividing the country into two regions could save $20 billion in damages should a large animal disease outbreak occur.
The Canadian Animal Health Coalition has devised a plan that calls for the establishment of two zones, with the dividing line at the crossing point between Manitoba and Ontario at West Hawk Lake.
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“It’s a lot like buying insurance,” said Clare Schlegel, president of the Canadian Pork Council, citing the benefits of zoning. “You hope you never have to use it, but you want to have the best policy you can.”
The idea behind zoning is that exports of animals and animal products could more quickly resume from the region of the country that did not have the disease. That would depend on Canada being able to demonstrate to its trading partners that the disease could not easily cross from one region to the other.
The animal health coalition would like the plan implemented around the middle of next year. Schlegel said the Canadian Pork Council would like to have it in place earlier than that because of the potentially devastating effects that a disease like foot-and-mouth could have on the country’s livestock industry.
“It would certainly help to minimize the risk,” he said.
Serecon Management Consulting Inc. of Edmonton did a study that estimated the damages from a large-scale foreign animal disease outbreak could approach $45 billion. Besides the direct impact on agriculture, there would be huge losses to other parts of the Canadian economy, including processors that would need to shut down plants or scale back production and the resulting loss of export markets.
With zoning in place, damages could be trimmed to about $25 billion, said Bob Burden, a partner in Serecon Management.
“The big thing is being able to get half your country back into the market.”
West Hawk Lake was chosen as the dividing point for the two regions because it is located at a good point for monitoring the movement of livestock and livestock products between Eastern and Western Canada. It is on the one main highway connecting Manitoba with northwestern Ontario.
Rob McNabb, assistant general manager of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, said the goal ultimately would be to have the country mapped into even smaller regions for the purposes of zoning.
“The smaller the zone, the greater the freedom of trade for the rest of the country.”
To zone the country into two main regions, a station would be needed at West Hawk to monitor the movement of livestock between the two sides of the country. The cost to staff it would be about $700,000 a year, said Curtiss Littlejohn, vice-chair of the Ontario Pork Council, who has been involved in the zoning effort.
Avian reminder
He said the avian flu outbreak in British Columbia this year heightened government and industry interest in a zoning strategy.
He said that zoning likely would not be as beneficial for managing the BSE situation. BSE can stay hidden in an infected animal for several years before being detected. The work involved in accounting for all the animals that might have had any kind of association with it over those years could prove astronomical, Littlejohn said.
