However, the Canadian Pork Council is also looking for supporting policies and programs at the federal level to enable us to hold our own in the international pork business. These include the following.
Export market development support, including personnel in our embassies and programs that assist industry in breaking into new markets and projecting our Canadian quality image to consumers abroad, need to be comparable to those available to our competitors, such as the United States.
We need a world-class veterinary product review and registration process similar to what's being done elsewhere in the world. Producers use veterinary pharmaceuticals judiciously to ensure the health and productivity of their animals, but the removal from sale of some older products and the emergence of new strains of disease necessitate timely access to safe, cost-effective pharmaceuticals.
According to work done by the George Morris Centre, an economic research firm in Guelph, Ontario, the average veterinary pharmaceutical review in Canada requires 1,200 days, whereas regulatory review in the U.S. is completed in fewer than 200 days. In Australia, the turnaround is well under 300 days. The time required for licensing veterinary drugs in Canada has, in many instances, been unacceptable.
Canada needs to have a comprehensive and coordinated national approach to dealing with animal health that engages both industry and governments, federal and provincial. The CPC shares with many other animal industry sectors a desire to have animal health more explicitly covered in the next Agricultural Policy Framework, APF II. Breeders are demanding public funding to ensure animal health protection and avoidance of foreign animal diseases. These measures will clearly be cost-effective, having regard to the enormous costs associated with the consequences of these diseases.
The Canadian Pork Council supports many of the changes that have occurred in the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization Program over the past year. However, hog producers remain vulnerable to asset losses that are beyond their control, most particularly those related to diseases. Hog producers do not have access to production insurance, in the way that many crop producers do. Currently, production insurance is a provincial responsibility. But we need clear federal government leadership to put in place an approach that provides a level playing field across the country, and in as trade neutral a manner as possible. Also, a clear catastrophic disaster program is needed, to provide assurances to producers when markets collapse as a result of a catastrophe — be it foreign animal disease that closes a border or a natural disaster.
Industry needs a regulatory environment at all levels of government — federal, provincial and municipal — which utilizes sound scientific information and, wherever possible, takes into account industry programs with complementary objectives. Examples include on-farm food safety, environmental compliance and animal health and welfare.