TORONTO — Federal and provincial agriculture ministers made a commitment more than two years ago to develop a comprehensive mandatory national traceability system for the livestock industry.
“They agreed that a mandatory comprehensive national system for livestock will be in place by 2011 and that implementation will be supported by national funding and regulatory framework,” ministers said in a July 10, 2009, statement.
Only Saskatchewan minister Bob Bjornerud dissented, preferring a voluntary system.
Tens of millions of dollars have been spent in the past 31 months to help industry comply, and ministers insist progress is being made, even though the 2011 deadline has been missed.
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But a private sector expert on designing traceability systems says the project is far behind schedule and making little progress.
Susan Wilkinson, an IBM Global Business Services expert on developing food safety and traceability systems for industry, told a Canadian Food Summit Feb. 7 that “government leadership in big picture thinking” is needed to move the project ahead.
“Despite a lot of years and a lot of money, we really haven’t got very far,” she said at the summit, which was organized by the Conference Board of Canada. “We are moving very slowly toward it.”
She said a large part of the problem is that responsibility for political leadership is divided between three levels of government jurisdiction. As a result, Canada is in danger of falling behind other countries.
“It truly is a global unstoppable force.”
Yet for University of Manitoba food safety specialist Richard Holley, the emphasis on the traceability project is misplaced.
“The irony is that we think if we move forward with comprehensive traceability programs, we are doing something meaningful in terms of food safety,” he said in an interview.
“I’m saying, ‘no, we’re not.’ We’re getting better traceability and that’s fine in and of itself, but don’t for a minute think you are making a significant contribution in terms of food safety because you’re not.”
He said spending money on things like that is analogous to installing a sunroof on a car that has bald tires.
In a passionate speech to the conference, Holley argued that concentration on traceability is more for show than effect. The most effective way to combat outbreaks of food-borne illness is to develop a national database on food-borne outbreaks and their causes that would let public health officials react quickly.
Gaetan Lussier, former federal deputy agriculture minister and current chair of the Canadian AgriFood Policy Institute, said food standards have to be national and not set by provinces or allowed to develop without direction or coherence by industry. A credible and robust national traceability program is a vital part of that effort.
