:
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our committee.
[English]
Pursuant to Standing Order 108, we are undertaking a study of African swine fever.
Welcome to our guests this morning.
[Translation]
From the Éleveurs de porc du Québec, we have the President, David Duval, and the Director, Martin Pelletier, of the Équipe québécoise de santé porcine.
Thank you for being with us this morning.
[English]
Also, from the Manitoba Pork Council we have Mr. Andrew Dickson, General Manager. By video conference, from Ontario Pork, we have John de Bruyn, Board Vice-Chair.
We'll start with opening statements.
[Translation]
Mr. Pelletier and Mr. Duval, you have six minutes for your opening remarks.
:
Good morning, everyone.
I am accompanied by the president of the Éleveurs de porcs du Québec and of the Équipe québécoise de santé porcine, or EQSP.
The Quebec swine sector provinces 26,500 jobs and generates $2.55 billion in economic benefits. It's the first agri-food industry export in Quebec. We export the equivalent of $1.68 billion, more than hydroelectricity. Seventy percent of the production is exported in more than 80 countries, which represents about 7% of the world trade of pork.
The main partners in the Quebec pork industry have come together around a common non-profit organization, the EQSP, to address swine health issues. This team was created in June 2013 and includes Les éleveurs de porcs du Québec, the Association québécoise des industries de nutrition animale et céréalière—the AQINAC—as well as the slaughterhouses that are signatories of the Convention de mise en marché des porcs du Québec, which account for approximately 99% of hog slaughter in Quebec.
The organization's mission is to work in concert with government authorities and all swine industry partners on prevention, preparation and intervention against targeted swine diseases in order to minimize their potential impacts on Quebec's swine industry. We are talking about targeted diseases in general because they are constantly evolving and spreading in various countries around the world.
Our mandate includes the 12 reportable diseases under the federal Health of Animals Act, including African swine fever. There are also emerging diseases, such as porcine epidemic diarrhea, or PED, that are not under the control of government authorities, but that the industry doesn't want to see spread among its livestock. There are also endemic diseases that have been around for several years, such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, against which the industry is working to reduce the harmful effects and eventually eradicate it.
Since 2008, the Quebec swine sector has been working on an emergency management plan. The first development phase was initiated at that time. Next, the EQSP was created. We have focused our efforts on PED and other emerging diseases. Now, given the threat of African swine fever, we are returning full force with an update and a new phase of development of our emergency management plan.
The illegal importation of contaminated pork products is one of the main issues linked to African swine fever. In this regard, we welcome the government's commitments on additional detector dogs, but implementation must be accelerated. It is important to increase surveillance activities, not only at airports, given the large volume of visitors who could import illegal products, but also at ports and in relation to international parcels. E-commerce is expanding rapidly, and there are risks to manage in this respect as well. We want to see significant penalties imposed on individuals who try to import potentially contaminated illegal products.
Concerning backyard and wild pigs, we expect the government to tighten controls on the ban on food waste and meat products. The regulations contain such a ban, but the controls in place must ensure that this ban is respected. Compliance with identification and traceability requirements must be ensured within these small herds. There must also be comprehensive Canadian collaboration in the management of backyard swine and wild pigs.
To maintain international trade, the government must accelerate negotiations with as many trading partners as possible to quickly reach agreements for recognition on zoning and compartmentalization. This would allow us to continue to export livestock from disease-free areas, based on the concept of compartmentalization.
As for the immediate investments needed, we believe it would be important to increase human and financial resources so that government authorities, be it the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or other agencies, can prepare for and manage a possible crisis; to have the resources to effectively manage public communications in crisis situations to maintain a positive image of the swine industry and pork products—especially in a situation where information flows widely on social media; to support financially and logistically industry efforts to prepare emergency management plans—we are already investing heavily here, but there are major issues for which we don't have sufficient resources; and to increase investments in the PigTrace traceability system to make it more efficient. But I must say that we already have a good basis in that regard.
In terms of necessary investments in crisis situations, it is important to immediately prepare a financial support plan for the sector to be deployed quickly in the event of a health crisis in order to avoid the collapse of the sector; to avoid catastrophic socio-economic impacts leading to animal welfare issues and human tragedies; and to support the industry in the orderly management of the impacts of a temporary closure of export markets.
Lastly, with regard to the financial tool for mid- and long-term funding, the Pork Promotion and Research Agency should be put in place as soon as possible so that this tool can be used more effectively in the coming years.
:
Good morning. Thank you for giving Manitoba Pork Council the opportunity to share some views on the challenges presented by African swine fever to the pork sector in Manitoba. You’ll have already heard from industry experts, including the Canadian Pork Council, on the national perspective, so I will provide some more local comments.
Manitoba Pork Council was created in legislation and regulation over 20 years ago to represent the interests of pork producers and to deliver programs and services of benefit to build the sector. Our 600-plus producers have over $2 billion invested in buildings and equipment—based on replacement cost—produce over eight million pigs annually, create employment for about 13,000 Manitobans, sell over three million weanlings into Iowa and Minnesota, and export about $1 billion in meat products globally. We ship about $500 million of pork to Japan alone. At any moment in time, we have about 3.4 million pigs on farm.
In terms of the impact of ASF, to put it bluntly, if we get a case of ASF in Manitoba, our industry could potentially be worthless overnight. We depend almost entirely on exporting pork to Japan, the United States, Mexico and China. If these markets deny entry of our products, we have no other markets of similar size to switch product destination.
A nightmare scenario is that all shipments will cease overnight. Our processing plants can only operate for a couple of weeks before they run out of cold storage capacity. The plants would have to stop taking delivery of live animals. They currently process about 100,000 per week of market hogs; some come from Saskatchewan. Our farms are currently operating with two to three days of feed on hand. Feed companies will start to demand payment in cash or cheque before delivery. Financial institutions will be unwilling to extend further operating funds as their security will now be worthless. Our U.S. contracts for weanling supply will be terminated at the border. Over 75,000 weanling pigs per week will no longer have a home as there is no spare finishing barn capacity in Canada. Within a week, our barns will no longer have the capacity to hold an expanding inventory as sows continue to farrow each day and our market hogs continue to grow in size and weight.
Our producers will have to start to drastically reduce the current inventory within seven to 10 days of the first case, involving at least 200,000 to 400,000 animals per week. With no foreseeable cash flow, producers will start staff layoffs for the 2,500 employees on farm, and the processing and service sectors will have to consider their staffing levels depending on their financial reserves.
I'll now address steps to deal with disaster and recovery.
Manitoba Pork Council believes the industry can recover to full production and economic activity within a reasonable period of time if certain key steps are followed. One is prevention. We need to create a mentality and system with our neighbours to the south of a “fortress North America” approach to disease management, to prevent diseases like ASF from getting onto our farms. On-farm biosecurity must be a real focus by all parts of the industry, not just the producer. In Manitoba, we have worked hard at this since 2012 with some innovative programs and regulations. More needs to be done to harden our on-farm biosecurity. Some financial incentives to encourage more investment would be appreciated.
Two is preparation. We need an agreement with Japan and South Korea that would allow a smaller primary control zone within a matter of a couple of weeks. Cash is king in the pork business. Cash is critical on hog farms and far more important than in most other farm enterprises. If pork shipments cannot restart for two to three months and we must start an orderly herd reduction program in Manitoba, producers will need access to cash by day three. Rough estimates, based on costs of production for 2019, show that we would need $40 million to $50 million per month to buy feed and $10 million to $15 million per month to pay wages. This is excluding any cash for other costs such as energy, transportation, borrowing costs and so on. It is fundamental to business recovery that we preserve the sow herd. This alone would require $10 million per month.
Funds will also need to be in place in order to proceed with a planned and orderly humane herd reduction. We are looking at a combination of centralized euthanasia sites and some on-farm herd reductions. This will be a very difficult program to administer and staff, let alone deal with the actual cash costs of implementation. As an aside, we don't want to see the scenario where producers want to be declared infected because the CFIA compensation is the only financial assistance out there.
Three is response. ASF is a relatively slow-moving disease, which should allow our production systems to isolate and eradicate any outbreak without it spreading as it has done in China. Europe has the disease and has been able to contain and control the disease.
Still regarding response, CFIA will play a key role in the control and eradication of the disease on the infected farm. The big one is that the provincial government will be the lead partner in dealing with the animal welfare issues on the vast bulk of the farms outside the CFIA eradication area. Manitoba Pork Council is working closely with officials to try to develop an emergency disease management plan for the worst-case scenario and then other options, depending on the extent of the market collapse. It is essential that government and industry work closely together and not in silos.
Four, regarding recovery, the ability of the pork sector in Manitoba to recover will depend on the following: (a) exports to Japan, the United States and China is reopened in two to three months; (b) the basic sow herd in Manitoba of 350,000 sows is retained and breeding is restarted; and (c) the workforce is retained through an agreement with the national employment insurance program. If these can be set in place, the pork sector in Manitoba could be in full production within 12 months.
Producers will have suffered significant financial losses that are not covered by the existing business risk management programs. New programs to encourage reinvestment will be needed to stabilize cash flows and loan guarantees to rebuild stock until they can get returns from the sale of animals. Export markets should be very attractive in terms of market prices, as the drop in total world production caused by the losses in China will have a knock-on effect. World pork demand and consumption will not have changed much because of the lack of spare production capacity in chicken and beef to fill this void.
Five, our key asks are to invest in some programs to create a “fortress North America” and harden our on-farm biosecurity. Create in advance the programs that will address the immediate financial crisis and the animal welfare challenges, protect the basic sow herd numbers to keep the critical mass of numbers to rebuild the industry, and then assist the industry to recover as an important sector of the economy. Finally, it is critical to get trade flowing normally within six to eight weeks.
Thank you for letting me sharing these.
:
Good morning. My name is John de Bruyn. I'm a pork producer with my family in Oxford County and somewhat saturated southwestern Ontario.
I'm happy to be here today to present to this committee on the activities to prevent and respond to the threat of ASF for the Canadian swine industry. I'm going to share some perspectives from Ontario's pork sector. Where possible I will also highlight the elements of the recent work by the Canadian Pork Council and Swine Health Ontario.
The Ontario pork sector represents a significant share of Canada's agri-food sector. We're talking about $950 million in GDP, $2.8 billion in economic output, and, we believe, 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs in Ontario.
Ontario pork is sought after for its high quality and is exported all over the world. Over the last several years, Ontario-produced pork has reached over 60 international markets.
As we are an industry that exports roughly two-thirds of our domestic production, international market access is a cornerstone of economic success. An ASF outbreak would result in the immediate closure of our export markets to the international world. Ontario Pork is encouraged by and strongly supportive of the federal government's continued commitment to promoting market access. We have been active in reiterating our support for these important initiatives including the CPTPP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Canada-United States-Mexico agreement, or NAFTA 2.0 as I call it.
African swine fever is very contagious and highly deadly to pigs and wild boars in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe, as you've already heard. Humans cannot catch ASF from infected pigs. They cannot contract the disease by eating meat from infected pigs, but humans can spread the disease and affect the pigs in many ways.
We are very thankful for the government's efforts to prevent African swine fever from impacting the industry and for the investment to increase the number of detector dogs at major ports of entry. Work still needs to be done to increase awareness among global travellers and industry with regard to foreign animal diseases and to identify the paths for the most efficient recovery of the industry should ASF be found in Canada.
Pork producers care about the health of their animals. Ontario Pork and industry stakeholders are founding members of what we call Swine Health Ontario, a leadership team committed to improving and coordinating the industry's ability to prevent, prepare for and respond to serious swine health threats in Ontario, working closely with our provincial government. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and Swine Health Ontario have been partially activating their incident command structures to allow them to proceed with ASF planning and preparedness in an organized and collaborative fashion.
The incident command system allows for organizations to embed personnel into the other organizations' structures so that all are simultaneously in the know regarding which items are being worked on. Areas of key concern include the ability to rapidly establish disease control zones in Canada and to have those zones recognized by international partners. Traceability will play a key role in disease eradication. The PigTrace system, reporting tools, biosecurity and surveillance systems must be strengthened to ensure they support rapid zoning and the reopening of our export markets. Ontario Pork continues to promote PigTrace and the education of producers about the systems to ensure producers' buy-in in order to take advantage of the zoning agreements.
Ontario Pork has also developed AgManifest software that replaces the physical paperwork of the industry hog movement. This software has been developed to feed movement information into the PigTrace database via electronic means to assist producers and processors in being compliant with federal regulations related to the traceability of swine in this country.
AgManifest needs to be enhanced to allow the electronic creation, signing and storage of the annex 4, swine movement document, certifying our ractopamine-free status for our international markets. This is required to accompany all hog movement into federally inspected plants.
We continue to invest in traceability, biosecurity, extension and research; however, government support is needed. We would like funding to develop a PigTrace 2.0 and to enhance the AgManifest tool to allow for electronic record-keeping for hog movements. Focus, please, on developing a response and recovery strategy for our industry. We are certainly encouraging the signing of bilateral zoning agreements with key pork markets like Japan and South Korea. We are very appreciative that the agreement was signed last week with the U.S.
As part of Ontario pork industry actions to address risks, ongoing collaboration efforts by producers, industry stakeholders and the provincial government include partial activation of the Swine Health Ontario incident command centre, developing roles and responsibilities for the incident command centre team, and confirming planning subgroups, team leaders and memberships. We are currently having biweekly telephone conferences to share status reports from all subgroups and team leads. We've encouraged IMS 100 and IMS 200 training, and sessions were held in order to get everybody up to speed.
The development of a market interruption response plan will address the economic impacts of a foreign animal disease.
Ontario Pork has been consulting with the chief veterinarian for Ontario to discuss potential market interruption priorities and activities in three key areas, which are engaging federal processors and, potentially, provincial abattoirs in planning for a large-scale market interruption for Ontario; developing a communications plan; and developing an on-farm emergency plan for producers.
The Ontario hog industry advisory committee will be discussing the market interruption strategy at a meeting in June 2019.
In communications, several steps have been taken to raise awareness of the disease and prevention strategies, including the importance of traceability and strong biosecurity. A multi-faceted communications campaign was launched in the late fall of 2018, with an information package on ASF prevention and education being mailed to all registered producers. A follow-up mailing with more detailed prevention and preparedness resources was sent out to producers and processors in April. Through social media, Ontario Pork continues to share updates and information provided by the Canadian Pork Council, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Canada Border Services Agency.
For our audiences beyond agriculture, Ontario Pork developed and shared information for the food service and restaurant industry about the dangers of providing food waste to pigs—
:
I think one of the issues that we're facing is that.... In psychology, they call it cognitive dissonance. This is such a huge issue that people are having a hard time getting their heads around it. The disease has been around a long time, and it's in China and so on. What's happened, though....
There are two factors. One is that half the world's pigs live in China. They've lost more in their production than we produce in total in North America, so the Chinese travel now. There's a huge trade connection with China. The U.S. buys a lot of its ingredients for its swine business from China. The second is that we're very dependent on trade, as Martin pointed out. In Manitoba, 90% of our stuff is exported out. If one market alone.... If Japan does not accept our pork, we're done.
To me, we need to start the process of getting financial programs in place so that producers on day one know where they stand.
I was involved in flood disaster assistance programs for many, many years when I worked for the department of agriculture in Manitoba. If we have these plans in advance, people know what to do. We don't want to be sitting on day one having a discussion about whether negative margins are covered under the AgriStability program, while producers are trying to get a hold of their accountants to find out what their cash positions are. This would be an absolutely ridiculous situation.
We need to start thinking it out now. Our basic hope is that this disease will never happen. We've had foot-and-mouth disease in Paraguay. It's been endemic there for many, many years. The last case that we had was in Saskatchewan in 1952. We can keep this disease out, I think, but if we do get a case, we need to have programs in place to be able to handle it. That's what we're trying to get across.
:
I'll take your last comment about backyard-raised pigs. It's a plausible scenario that in British Columbia, the farm-raised pigs could maybe be the place where ASF lands in this country. The zoning issue would be the most important next step. That would put the whole country off the market for a predetermined amount of time.
The U.S. has already said that if we isolated it to a certain part of this country, we could have access again. But just envision Japan or some of our other largest markets not recognizing our zoning or our attempt to zone. That speaks to the traceability issue as well, that this whole country would be held hostage for a least a year, and possibly longer, if you look back to the mad cow case of 2013.
At that time, I think the question would then become, do we want an industry and at what size? I think a quick zoning recognition by other countries would give us the ability to rebuild this industry in a relatively short period, and we'd be the exporters that we'd like to be. A prolonged period of no access to international markets would force this country to rethink our position on pork production for the foreseeable—
:
There is a difference between pork and live pigs. The pork products are governed by CFIA and all the regulations. We import a significant amount of pork from the United States as well, and there are long-standing trade agreements on that.
All our live animals in Canada have to have certificates of health when they go down there. Very few live animals come back from the United States. The only ones I know of are breeding stock through genetic companies, and they have to go into a quarantine period before they are released to farms.
At this time Canada doesn't import live animals from the United States for processing, that I know of. It makes no sense anyway to ship them here. They make more money processing them in the United States.
In terms of our transportation regulations, CFIA is in the process of changing the regulations, and one of the issues we have to deal with is the washing of trailers that come back from the United States. In Manitoba we've instituted a hog transportation program using our marketing regulation, whereby all trailers coming back from the United States have to be properly washed and disinfected at certified wash stations. Our problem is that we don't trust the wash stations in the United States to do that at this time. There is no certification program down there.
Currently trailers going to slaughter plants can come back into Canada as long as they've been scraped down. Our regulations will preclude that. All trailers coming back will have to be cleaned and disinfected at proper wash stations in Manitoba. It only applies to Manitoba. The regulations for other provinces have not been changed.
Thank you to all the presenters.
I want to start with Mr. de Bruyn and say thank you, first of all, for coming to my constituency office last week so we could talk about this in more detail. In our conversation, we talked a bit about PigTrace and going to PigTrace 2.0. Mr. Pelletier just said that the data is hard to get and that sharing of data is one of the difficulties. We talked about zoning and traceability.
Could you talk a bit more about PigTrace 2.0 and how it might be developed through the barn that's just north of Guelph, if we put some investment into the technology in the pig barn north of Guelph, the research station?
:
PigTrace is a stand-alone product that represents traceability for livestock. The swine version is called PigTrace.
It's very important for us to get back into the market. I think, first of all, the best thing for North America is not to have ASF land in North America, and not to land in Canada is probably the number two best scenario. If it lands in this country, PigTrace will be vital to convincing our trading partners that we know where the disease is, that we've isolated it to a certain area, and that we can then assure our trading partners that other areas of the country will not receive pigs or products from that area.
I think I'm convinced that, if ASF landed on our shores, eradicating it in this country would not be difficult with the value that PigTrace adds to our knowledge of where pigs are and where they're moving.
From a producer's perspective, I guess there is still a learning curve, so there are some producers who maybe don't yet see the importance of submitting their data. There are some big government issues, I guess. Then I think the program has been funded reasonably so far to collect the data, but to my knowledge, nobody has indulged in searching how we would use it now in the case of a disease outbreak or whether we should maybe put a few more resources towards some analysis of the data and its effectiveness in the zoning process.
Does that answer your question, Mr. Longfield?
:
That's a very fair statement. I think most producers are at least at the cellphone stage, not all. I think the capabilities of technologies now would be that, when a producer markets his hogs, whether they're from one barn to another, or straight to a processor, or even to another province, that the technology is there.
Ontario Pork has built a platform above PigTrace, we'll call it, an interface that allows our producers to submit their information through the AgManifest platform, which then provides it to PigTrace. That allows for a couple of things. It also allows for producers to use that data in their own management of their farms.
The part that we're trying to add right now is what we call an annex 4, and that's a requirement. The CFIA has done a great job on protecting our international markets. Some of our customers demand that we don't use a certain product called ractopamine and, in order to assure our customers of that, we need to fill out this paper, annex 4. We're in discussions with CFIA right now to make that an electronic signature to facilitate better movement of information.
Mr. de Bruyn and all of you, thank you so much.
I'm not sure the general public reads about it and actually has an understanding of the significance it would have to a very significant part of our economy in this country. When you were talking about the traceability, it would seem to me that establishing the zones and getting that established with our trading partners is critical. It is vital, along with the pig traceability. You have your zones and then the traceability of how everything moves. I know in the chicken industry the trucks don't go into the farms unless they go through some disinfectant first. I've seen them stop at the laneway, do whatever they do on the vehicle and then proceed into the farm.
In terms of the zoning you have with countries, did you actually get what you want? Second, is there a continuity with the trading partners that we have in terms of establishing those zones, not only within a province? John's within Ontario, as opposed to Manitoba or Quebec. Did we get what we wanted in the zoning, and is there a continuity with it with our trading partners?
I'm not sure who wants to take that.
John.
:
Welcome to our second hour on the study of African swine fever, pursuant to Standing Order 108.
With us, we have a video conference witness from Maple Leaf Foods, Iain Stewart, the Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Pork Complex, from Toronto, Ontario. Also, from Olymel, we have Mr. Réjean Nadeau, Chief Executive Officer.
Welcome to our committee.
[Translation]
We'll start with your presentations, for seven minutes each.
Mr. Nadeau, would you like to start?
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Olymel is already working with national associations, industry and governments on the issue of African swine fever. I will therefore try to avoid duplication with other presentations, and will focus on our own message instead.
For a company like ours that exports more than 50% of its pork products, the appearance and reporting of a case of AFS could have disastrous consequences for the company: a drop in sales of almost 50%, or about $2 billion; a reduction in the number of jobs by about 7,000; a decrease in slaughter volumes of about 50%.
This would, of course, have a major impact on all Olymel's service providers and suppliers. It would also lead to a significant loss of income for producers and farm families in all regions of Quebec. Finally, as the storage capacity for fresh and frozen products is already saturated, commercial hogs and piglets would need to be disposed of, and sow farrowing would have to be stopped.
In our opinion, it is almost unthinkable that a single case of African swine fever in wild boars, or on a hobby farm, could lead to the complete closure of Canada's borders.
One of Olymel's recommendations is that the federal government be very active in lobbying the World Organisation for Animal Health to address the fact that ASF should be on the list of diseases causing such trade disruption. Given that African swine fever has no implications for human health, but rather for swine herds, much like porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED), why not treat ASF like PED, and let the industry deal with the disease and its eradication, with no disproportionate impact on all the markets?
Olymel applauds and congratulates the government for its proactive role and the speed with which tangible actions have been taken to prevent ASF from entering Canada. All those efforts are necessary, of course.
However, we have concerns about the additional control measures put in place in seaports. To date, we have not had a concrete answer on the measures in place to detect illegal feed entries from countries affected by ASF. In light of what was discovered in the United States a few weeks ago, we can suspect that feed is passing freely through the controls in place.
A lot of work needs to be done to prepare for a prompt response in the event of ASF. Our preparedness and prompt response are essential to quickly containing the disease. However, a number of questions remain unanswered in terms of the key aspects of an intervention plan.
For example, what about epidemiological and screening investigations, increased biosecurity and cleaning and disinfection activities, quarantine and movement controls, mass depopulation and euthanasia on farms, and options for the disposal of carcasses following mass depopulation?
On March 27, Olymel held a discussion forum in Winnipeg with all stakeholders in the western Canadian pork industry. A number of the issues above remain outstanding. The role of government in preparing is important. Industry needs some officials to answer those questions.
The World Organisation for Animal Health has provided for zoning and compartmentalization as tools for countries to restore the security of international trade in the event of an infectious disease outbreak.
Olymel believes in the importance of having the compartments in place before a case occurs. The zones, however, will be established during an ASF outbreak. Olymel would like to stress the importance of the recent agreement with the U.S. on enforcing the zones to allow trade between the two countries to continue. The efforts to reach an agreement must continue with our primary partners. We are thinking mainly of Japan, China and Mexico.
Olymel is a member of the working group on zoning and compartmentalization. The pork industry, the Canadian Pork Council, the Canadian Meat Council, Canada Pork International, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have a coordinated approach to zoning and compartmentalization in Canada.
Finally, the government has an important role to play in helping the industry define compartments and negotiate agreements with the major countries to which we export. It is important to quickly determine whether the Canadian pork sector will be able to establish compartments and whether the Canadian traceability system is sufficiently reliable to allow for setting up zones and recognizing compartments.
Thank you very much for your attention. I am ready to answer any questions you may have.
:
Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today.
I have had the opportunity to go through some of the other presentations, so I know there has been considerable detail provided on preparedness and prevention on ASF. I would like to change the level to discuss both macro and personal outcomes as they relate to the impact of ASF on Canada's pork sector.
I applaud the focus of careful planning for prevention and preparedness. I also recognize the motivating force of a guillotine effect in an instant trade embargo. However, notwithstanding all the careful planning and scientific rigour brought to bear on this vexing problem, most scientists and epidemiologists we've talked to tell me that ASF will certainly arrive on our shores.
I would like to tell a personal story. At Maple Leaf, we operate 205 hog sites that employ 714 people. We also operate two pork plants at Lethbridge and Brandon that employ another 2,500 people and process nearly four million hogs per year. We recognize the threat ASF poses to our employees' security and well-being. Many of our employees are new Canadians who have come here to make a better life.
Consider William and Selene, who both work in our Brandon facility. William has worked on our cut floor for 12 years. He started out as an hourly employee in the packaging area when he emigrated from El Salvador. Today, William is a supervisor on the loin line, our biggest production department in Brandon with nearly 200 employees. His wife Selene emigrated from El Salvador two years earlier. She also started on the production floor in the ham-boning department and now works as a food safety technician in our QA department. They have two boys. They own a home, and they are extremely proud of the life they have built for themselves in Brandon. Their hope is that their boys will continue their education and thrive as they have been able to do.
If ASF arrives in Canada tomorrow, thousands of families like William and Selene's would lose their livelihoods, and many of them overnight. Imagine that, overnight, thousands of families on the street.
While it's extremely difficult to quantify the full potential impacts of an ASF outbreak, economists routinely say the impact would be over $45 billion to the U.S. and Canadian economies and potential direct and indirect job losses for over 125,000 people.
This isn't about some sick animals, and it isn't about human illness. ln the 21st century, this is about economic Armageddon over sudden trade embargoes. That any person in this room would allow such human devastation over the outbreak of an inevitable animal disease is simply wrong, and we believe it's morally wrong. We have the tools, skills and intellect to do better.
At Maple Leaf, we are trying to do our part in prevention. We are stepping up our biosecurity, educating our employees and advocating for policies to protect our borders. We have also embarked on a compartmentalization project for our western hog supply to keep our business running and our ability to export intact. However, who knows if that will be acceptable. We are piloting a geofence for hog barns that tracks movements of trucks and the livestock they carry to help us analyze movement and isolate animal disease issues, like ASF, if they occur.
Despite all our efforts, we find ourselves like the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in a dike trying to hold back a threat we can't see until it has done its damage.
We certainly have great respect for the OIE and what it has done historically, but 100 years later ASF is shattering old paradigms, and that means we must adopt a new one. Our goal of “prevent and prepare” is simply inadequate. Our new goal should be, take away the risk of financial ruin for these tens of thousands of families, and keep trade flowing.
We need to think differently, creatively and ambitiously. As an executive, two of the most powerful words in my vocabulary are “why” and “how”. Therefore, I challenge the government and industry to consider the following: Why does ASF in wild boar stop all trade? Why does ASF stop trade but PEDv does not? How can we ensure that decision-makers like you fully understand what is at stake here? Why don’t we have a progressive architecture that solves for risk and allows trade to continue? Why don’t we have a vaccine? Why don’t we have a kill step in the meat?
There simply is no overreacting to ASF. If trends continue, the virus could become truly pandemic and endemic. Therefore, we need to think differently and boldly. We need to make everything possible and not be bound by what seems doable.
I would urge Canadian leaders to never allow a pig virus to steal the livelihood of any of the hundreds of thousands who could also be impacted. I would urge government and industry to find 21st-century solutions to a new challenge and not be blinded by mere prevention and preparedness.
I would urge Canadian and global leaders to act right now. This could occur tomorrow. This has real human impact. These people who work so hard are counting on us.
I leave you with four considerations. First, we need to consider how we change the rules with OIE to allow trade to continue under certain scenarios. The human devastation isn't worth the benefit of not doing so.
Second, we need aggressive deployment of zoning and biosecure compartmentalization as an immediate outcome.
Third, we need to find testing protocols that can ensure the meat we ship is safe, even if the disease is close by. This is also the art of the possible.
Finally, there must be technologies that can provide a kill step as a last resort. For example, can ultra-high pressure pasteurization be made to work acceptably or irradiation or any other means that we haven't yet thought of?
Thank you for your time and attention.
Mr. Nadeau, you also mentioned the impact of the consequences of even one case and how disastrous it could be. I'm assuming you're looking at it in the same way, with the urgency and emergency that exists to make sure we have a plan and talk about the concerns we have with trade agreements.
You may be aware that I come from Red Deer where we have an Olymel plant and, of course, we have had issues with China on non-tariff trade barriers. Hopefully that is being dealt with, but we urgently have to make sure we keep everything on the straight and narrow so that people aren't concerned about it.
Can you give us a bit of an update as to how you feel we should be dealing with trade issues that might exist?
Thanks, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Nadeau, for being here.
Mr. Stewart, particular thanks to Rory McAlpine at Maple Leaf, who really brought this to my attention back in January or so, saying that this is an issue we need to deal with urgently. Thanks to the committee for approving this brief study we're doing.
I ran out of time in the last panel, but with the traceability of food being part of that, at Maple Leaf, how much effort are you putting into the traceability of the food going into the barns?
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I know we should be working on them now. I hope I'm wrong, but when this happens, everything needs to be in a bow and ready to go. There is not going to be a lot of time.
The nature of the hog industry in Canada only allows so much to back up. As you heard Mr. Nadeau say earlier, we collectively export 70% of the product we raise, so within three to five days, depending on who you talk to, every freezer is full and markets are collapsing around us. It will have an almost immediate impact on people who work in the further processing side and producer side.
I am concerned about some of the mental health issues that I'm sure you would have heard of over the last while. All those programs need to be put in place, as well as some things that I'm sure came up over the course of the day.
The CPC has a Canadian ag partnership application for $10 million; that's in play. Animal health Canada, which has just started, is such a good program and we just need to push forward with that for the future, but it is going to be challenging to help us right now. The other thing I would do is put in the pork promotion and research agency, which you probably heard about this morning, and put a check-off in. We need to find ways to get this funding.
In terms of the money from the government, it's a big number. I would be hesitant to put that forward. I'm sure there are smarter people than me who can come up with that answer, unless Mr. Nadeau has it.
There are a couple of things. We're in an enhanced buyer security situation today, so we take it to another level. This means that everything has to be signed in and signed out. All trucks are watched going in. Most trucks that go into barns where hogs would be or to deliver hogs are now baked. That kills basically.... Washing gives you a little bit of a break. Baking a truck will actually give you a thermal break in terms of disease that lands on the truck. Within our MLF facilities, every truck that would be going in is baked.
Within a plant we're very strict about who interacts with the animals. There are simple things. We just had a positive for PEDv over the weekend. What that means is that anybody who goes to that barn cannot go to another barn for 48 hours. No truck that goes there can go anywhere else for 48 hours, even with a thermal break.
Our people in our MLF facility, even in the head office, are not allowed to consume pork products. You can't take them into a barn, because you never know. It could be in a product at some point—it's fed to an animal somehow. We have just eliminated doing this altogether. Nobody in our MLF facility is allowed to bring pork products into a barn, or actually into our head office for MLF, as a sign of solidarity with the rest of the team.
There are much more heightened routines than that in terms of how we clean the plant, how we clean the barns, how we clean each of the trucks. We're now spending considerably more money than we would have in the past—I'd say two to three times more—just to give ourselves a better biosecurity break. I'm sure Olymel is doing something similar.
Thank you, Mr. Nadeau and Mr. Stewart, for appearing before us. I agree with you that this is an extremely important issue.
Mr. Stewart, I hope you are wrong and that the swine fever will not be coming here.
I was in China with a delegation last week. We were having bilateral meetings with the executive of the National People's Congress. Agriculture was one of the topics. There's a great deal of concern for their hog industry—perhaps that's even understating it—and the effects this disease could have in China, into Vietnam and into Korea.
Having said that, you talked about a new paradigm for making sure our hog industry is safe, not just a “preserve and protect” one. Can you elaborate a little on that?
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I think the challenge in front of us is the current OIE rules on ASF and not being able to trade. We've talked already today about how the minute that this happens—whether it's a wild boar in Cape Breton or Vancouver Island, even if it's away from the domestic hog production side—borders will close pretty much immediately. That is a challenge that you see in China, Vietnam and others.
The paradigm we're talking about is that we need to revisit the OIE and the rules around compartmentalization and willingness to trade. If you believe like I do that, absent a vaccine, this is going to continue around the world, then you end up in a place where you have a lot of protein in parts of the world and no ability to ship it into other parts where there is demand for it.
Last week when you were in China, their numbers on sows would say that they're down almost 10 million sows. That's the Chinese number. That's not somebody guessing. They tend to be conservative on some of those types of things.
We believe that is going to change the thinking around OIE and how everybody else interacts to get to a set of principles that will allow product to still flow and be traded, whether that's compartmentalization or not. That's the new paradigm that we're talking about that we have to push for.
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Mr. Nadeau and Mr. Stewart.
I have a few more general questions. I understand the urgency for the government to have a response plan if a case were found.
Mr. Nadeau, I particularly appreciated your comment about the OIE. The industry must be allowed to respond more directly without closing all the markets, because there really is no danger for humans. People can be really scared about African swine fever, but they are not told enough about the fact that it has no effect on humans.
Statistics Canada has just published some statistics on pork sales. In 2018, sales of pork internationally decreased by 8.9%, but China will probably increase its imports of pork for some time. How are those major market fluctuations handled in the event of livestock diseases? There are positive aspects to the situation, but there is also clearly a negative side. At the moment, Canada is benefiting from a positive aspect of the appearance of African swine fever, but, one day, China will replenish its stock.
When that day comes, how will we be able to avoid employee lay-offs and to maintain the industry's performance? That question is for you, Mr. Nadeau.