Thank you, Mr. Chair.
All foods in Canada are subject to the Food and Drugs Act and regulations. In addition to that, we also have trade and commerce legislation that does apply to specific foods in Canada. So under the Canada Agricultural Products Act we do have a range of regulations that cover various food products, primarily oriented around those that are grown and manufactured in Canada.
The jam that you're speaking of is covered by the processed product regulations, and there are provisions in those regulations that relate to jams as well as other processed fruits and vegetables.
I'm not aware of the plant that you're referring to, but there is provision to be registered by the CFIA to be inspected for the purposes of interprovincial and international trade. Certainly, if you leave us the name of that company, we'd be happy to follow up on that.
The provisions are not overly onerous and they are equivalent to those in the FDA. The FDA does not have trade and commerce legislation, so they don't have a lot of preregistration requirements related to products going into that country. So at times it's not surprising that FDA is willing to accept a product solely on the basis of our food and drug legislation and not necessarily looking at the additional provisions of trade and commerce.
On nutrition labelling, all food safety and labelling provisions that apply to Canadian manufacturers and products also apply to imports. In the case of nutrition labelling, there are some slight differences between our nutrition panels, and this has been a point of discussion between Canada and the U.S. for a number of years and continues to be through working groups under the NAFTA.
With regard to the security and prosperity partnership, there is a range of food-related issues that have been identified for discussion with FDA and our counterparts in Mexico as well. One of the initiatives we are currently looking at relates to fresh fruit and vegetable safety, because industries and governments in all of our countries are looking at means to enhance produce safety. So that has been a focal point of attention.
With the announcement of leaders recently in Montebello, we are also looking at initiatives relating to import product safety. So there's a great deal of close cooperation between CFIA and the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. We do a lot of work together, a lot of food safety investigations together, and we cooperate on food recalls as well.