Federal and provincial government agencies are moving to create a national agriculture and food traceability system that will link existing databases so disease outbreaks can be more effectively controlled, said Wayne Lees, Manitoba’s chief provincial veterinary officer.
Government and industry officials will work together in the coming months on the details of a pilot project aimed at finding the best way to make use of existing resources.
“By trying a pilot project, we can see what works. We need to pursue opportunities to demonstrate how traceability could work all the way from birth to slaughter. Then the food traceability systems can carry on from there,” said Lees, who spoke at the Manitoba Cattle Producers Association annual general meeting in Brandon Dec. 14. “We need to be able to test the technologies.”
Read Also
Malting barley exporters target Mexican market
Canada’s barley sector is setting its sights on the Mexican market to help mop up some of the lost demand from China
A November meeting of provincial and federal agriculture ministers concluded that a plan for a national agrifood traceability system should be in place by December 2007.
“It’s more than just livestock, it’s all foods, all commodities. We’re looking at linking animal and plant traceability systems with food traceability.”
Lees cited the recent outbreak of E. coli in
U.S. spinach, which sickened hundreds and led to products being taken off store shelves across Canada, as an indication of the need for such a system.
“If we had been able to identify very clearly in the first little while that it was spinach that was grown in a few counties in the U.S., then all the other Canadian producers wouldn’t have been affected.”
Traceability, which is becoming crucial in agriculture especially in the wake of BSE, is the ability to trace food production from its beginning on the farm, through the processing chain to the consumer’s dinner plate.
Being able to determine quickly and accurately where an animal came from is a key element of emergency management and planning ahead for disease outbreaks or even natural disasters such as floods. To do this, officials need to be able to identify the animal or product, its premises and where it was moved.
The traceability system used by the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency is not sufficient because it only talks about bovines. While it works for markets, that would not be enough knowledge in a foot-and-mouth epidemic, which affects all cloven-hoofed animals.
“You have a higher standard for emergency management. You have to know both what the cattle situation is and what the pig situation is,” Lees said. “If you build a traceability system that will handle emergencies well, then you can do all those other things, like having market advantage.”
While he described the CCIA as a “great success” in animal identification, more needs to be done to add premises identification into the new comprehensive system, especially for multiple species.
Tracing animal movements may be more challenging, he added.
“We need to develop systems that can efficiently track animals as they move from one place to another without a lot of paperwork or red tape. Nobody wants more paperwork or red tape. All that is wanted is the essential information,” he said.
Lees, who worked on British Columbia’s avian influenza outbreak and BSE, said emergency response teams are under tremendous pressure to find out where an outbreak originated, how far it spread and how it might be stopped. Ideally, any system should give officials up-to-date information on 99 percent of all the animals at risk within three hours.
“With BSE, the estimate was that it was costing us $5 million a day. So if we can stop an outbreak even one or two days earlier, it’s a huge payoff in terms of our ability to get back into the marketplace,” he said.
The need for officials to have fast access to reliable information on a range of livestock species became apparent during the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic in the United Kingdom. Seven million sheep and cattle were culled in a catastrophe that cost the industry there $15 billion.
“What spread foot-and-mouth around the U.K.? Sheep spread foot-and-mouth around the U.K. for six weeks before they actually identified it. Minor species can be our Achilles heel if we don’t include them in the system.”
Voluntary systems simply don’t work in emergencies, he said.
“You have half the information, but you don’t know which half. Some people belong, some don’t. That’s not good enough.”
The pilot project will look at how the various separate information pools now in existence might be integrated.
“We’re working out who might be interested and how it might work. The whole goal of this traceability initiative is to make all of these bits and pieces of information flow together so that they work in one system,” he said.
“Cost is one of the major issues, but I think it’s clear that governments are prepared to support these initiatives.”
