- WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters)
-- Canada will keep cattle brains, spines and other materials that pose
a risk of transmitting mad cow disease out of pig and poultry feed, the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Friday.
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- The strict new feed rules come more than a year after
an expert panel recommended changes in the wake of the country's first
home-grown case of mad cow disease, discovered last May.
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- "We felt it was time to signal the direction we
plan to go in order to allow us to move to a different stage of consultation
and begin to really bear down on the details," said Billy Hewett,
director of policy for the international affairs section of the CFIA, the
federal food safety agency.
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- Canada banned the practice of adding protein made from
rendered cattle and other ruminants to cattle feed in 1997 -- a practice
that scientists believe can spread the brain-wasting disease.
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- Poultry and pigs had been allowed to eat rendered cattle
material because they are not susceptible to the disease.
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- The new rule, which will be refined over coming months,
is designed to ensure cattle are not accidentally fed the wrong kind of
feed on farms with more than one type of livestock, or from mills that
make both kinds of feed.
-
- Canada will also ban dead and sick cattle from being
rendered into feed ingredients, the CFIA said.
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- Canada's beef and feed industries had lobbied Ottawa
to work in step with U.S. regulators so that feed rules did not become
a trade irritant.
-
- But U.S. officials on Friday asked for comments on ideas
for stricter feed rules, and said they may not have final regulations in
place until 2005 or 2006.
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- The feed rules will help Canada's efforts to overturn
13-month-long trade bans on cattle and beef, which have devastated its
export-dependent industry, Agriculture Minister Bob Speller said.
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- "I think that other countries around the world will
see that Canada has in fact taken more action than any country in terms
of dealing with this issue," Speller said.
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- Hewett said Canada will continue to work to harmonize
its feed rules with the United States, but it needed to respond to concerns
from other trade partners who wondered how Canada had dealt with its mad
cow risks.
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- "Our sense, on the basis of discussions that we've
been having with (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), is that their
thinking is along a similar line," Hewett told Reuters in an interview.
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- Meat and beef industry officials agreed.
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- "I'm comfortable that (the feed rules) will be harmonized
in an effective way so as to not put either country at a competitive disadvantage,"
said Stan Eby, president of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association.
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- But the new measures were expected to increase costs
for Canadian slaughter plants and renderers, and decrease returns for ranchers.
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- Memphis-based consultants Sparks Co. is analyzing how
much material Canada will need to dispose of and how much that will cost.
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- "I think the costs associated with it are going
to be quite, quite high," said Humphry Koch, executive vice-president
of West Coast Reduction Ltd., a rendering company.
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- Koch said he was relieved U.S. officials appeared to
be leaning toward similar measures, but said there is no scientific reason
the material should be kept out of pig and poultry feed.
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- "I'm not sure it's going to open up any markets
for us that aren't already opened," Koch said.
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- - Additional reporting by Jeffrey Jones in Calgary
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