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Farm-Scape, Episode 1531

The Ad Hoc Intergovernmental CODEX Task Force on animal feeding has approved an international code of practice for the manufacture and use of feeds for food producing animals.

The CODEX task force on feeding met last month in Denmark to finalize rules on three unresolved issues which had been deleted from a code of practice approved last year.

Canadian Food Inspection Agency Feed Evaluation Coordinator Judy Thompson says these included the definition of feed additives, biotech feed labeling, and details related to traceability.

"The first one was the feed additive definitions. It was very important to the Europeans that is was clear from the definitions that it included all of the types of products that they wanted it to so there was a footnote added to identify some of those types of products to make sure they were appropriately dealt with.

The second issue was a paragraph that talked about labeling of biotech products. This is problematic for many countries because there really hasn't been any decisions made about how foods developed from modern biotechnology would be labelled and it didn't make sense to have labeling of feed and feed ingredients before you made that decision.

The task force agreed to wait until decisions are made on food labeling before doing anything about feed labeling for biotech products.

The last area was about traceability and it was really the level of detail that was in the original paragraph.

Now the paragraphs are a bit more generic and allow for the flexibility necessary to achieve the desired outcome, which is to make sure you know where you bought product from and where you shipped them to so that, if there is a problem identified in terms of consumer health, that you can go back to your supplier and say there was a problem with it".

Thompson says the three newly completed sections have been forwarded for final approval and inclusion into the code that was accepted last year. She expects that to happen next month.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.