Farm-Scape, Episode 2018

The Canadian Pork Council plans to create a new body which will oversee the day to day operation of its planned national hog identification and traceability system.

Last month the CPC National Hog Identification and Traceability Working Group completed two rounds of consultations aimed at outlining the technical elements of a proposed national traceability system for swine.

CPC Technical Affairs Specialist Francois Bedard says the group is ready to move forward on the implementation strategy and is now developing a policy decision making body that will address the specific components of traceability.

"The important decision making body will always be the CPC board of directors in a sense, so the large scale decisions but, for decisions that are more on a practical basis, a day to day basis, interactions between the CFIA, discussions that are taking place with the Canadian Livestock Identification Agency, those are some of the responsibilities that this group would undertake.

We're developing the relationships, the roles and responsibilities of the key players such as the provincial pork organizations, the CPC, the Canadian Livestock Identification Agency, the CFIA to find the roles and responsibilities between those players and trying to find the most efficient body that could take all of those different players and bring them to a table together and move forward with the various elements in our program.

In terms of the composition, time frames, those still need to be decided upon."

Bedard says the traceability working group has developed a number of proposed strategies and structures for presentation to the CPC board of directors.

He says the hope is to have a template in place that will define how the body will look and function by the spring in order to get things in place and moving forward by the beginning of the summer.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.