Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chicken Farmers of Canada proudly represents 2,800 chicken farmers. While the number of other farmers may be shrinking, we are up a hundred farmers in the last year. We are a growth industry on farmers even. We have a value chain, and it's a value-added industry. We have 244 hatching egg farms that go to 40 hatcheries, 76 feed-mills, and 191 processing plants across the country. We purchase 2.6 million tonnes of feed a year, supporting farmers in the grains and cash crop sector.
We are a driving force in supporting jobs, economic growth, and prosperity in both rural and urban communities across every province. We sustain 87,000 jobs, contribute $6.8 billion to the economy, and pay $2.2 billion in taxes.
We welcome the development of the next agricultural policy framework. Past frameworks have provided farmers from coast to coast with the policy support and programming required to make agriculture a success in this country. Our farmers have appreciated the opportunity to be engaged and consulted by government in order for it to better understand the needs of our industry and our priorities moving forward.
Chicken Farmers of Canada was present in Calgary when the “Calgary statement” was approved in July. We believe that the requests of the Canadian chicken industry are in alignment with that statement.
First and foremost, from a policy perspective, we appreciate your continued support of supply management, a system that allows us to provide stability and that is really our risk management program. We have made many representations over the past couple of years in terms of the integrity of the import control pillar with regard to illegal imports around spent fowl and the duties relief program. I'll leave those for another time.
Our first recommendation pertains to the issue of public trust. Public trust is really three things: doing the right thing, implementing assurance systems, and communicating to consumers.
Canada's agriculture sector is one of the most respected and valued sectors, both at home and abroad. However, with the heightened dissemination of information that comes with growing social networks and technological advances, consumers are becoming concerned about where their food comes from and more aware of the environmental, animal welfare, and health and safety impacts of food production.
Our farmers are proud of the chicken they raise—safely, with care, to high standards. They are doing the right thing on their farms.
Chicken Farmers of Canada has a federal, provincial, and territorial on-farm food safety system that is recognized. We are the first commodity to receive full recognition, in 2013. Only one other commodity, dairy, has passed through that program. It has best practices in terms of biosecurity and disease prevention. It is audited annually, and 100% of the farmers are on the program.
We also have a third party audited mandatory animal care program. It is designed to demonstrate the level of care that we have. It is based on the code of practice, and we just updated our code of practice in 2016. It includes animal care requirements, and it's based on research and science.
I think the biggest difference between the two is that one has an FPT-recognized protocol and the other doesn't. One of our biggest first tasks here is that we implement for animal welfare the same type of recognition protocol that we have on food safety.
We are going through an animal care assessment framework right now. There are animal rights groups and researchers involved in this committee. We think this forms the basis of the technical recognition of a program, and we would like to see that put in place. As Troy was saying, food safety and animal care are a shared responsibility and a public good. We take our part very seriously.
In respect of the on-farm animal care and food safety programs, Chicken Farmers of Canada and its partners across the country spend $3.4 million a year managing this system and implementing it. That means training, certifying auditors, program administration, conducting third party audits, and revising and updating the program and keeping it current.
Of that portion, on the food safety side, about $100,000 a year goes for the CFIA third party audit that has to be done each year. We pay $3.4 million. We think there is a public good and a sharing, and we would like to see that sharing on an ongoing basis. Our second ask is that we put in not a program that lasts for two or three years but one in which there is an ongoing sharing of the costs that are certain for us moving forward. We don't want to develop programs that are at no cost to us and then, once the government funding goes, the programs fall apart because we haven't factored them into our overall costs.
Public trust also requires that government convey messages about our industry. We will convey our messages through our value chain on our sector, but we need good government communication from a public trust perspective in order to assure the public that government is doing its part. Whether it's CFIA or standing up for CFIA, we need to ensure that trust is conveyed not by us but by government as an amplifier of what we're doing.
Federal and provincial governments have made it clear in their mandates that the environment is a key priority for everyone in the coming years. We're looking at our impact in terms of that. Chicken production has one of the lowest meat impacts in environmental production. We're looking at it. We're doing a life-cycle assessment right now to understand exactly where we are and where we can improve. We hope to have that concluded in 2017.
I'll talk for a minute on innovation. We're pleased to see in that Calgary statement the importance of innovation. We support that. We like the cluster funding program that had gone on in the last agricultural policy framework. We think it needs to be enhanced from a contribution perspective in the funding level, but we would also like to see it not limited to five years. Can we not do an ongoing funding process so that we can make long-term commitments?
The challenge for us in poultry is that, unlike in beef and pork, that have three and two Agriculture Canada research stations, we have no research stations for poultry at Agriculture Canada. In the last cuts, we lost our last two poultry scientists.
In the whole poultry industry, we have developed a network of research and chairs at universities across the country. In order to provide that on an ongoing basis, we want to see cluster funding that goes on a long-term basis, not just for five years where we have to go back, and now it's a case of whether or not we can re-fund at those research stations at universities.
We are taking a significant step ahead on antimicrobial use reduction. This is one of our public trust issues. The poultry industry has voluntarily, across the whole industry, agreed not to use class one antibiotics on a preventative basis in poultry production. That has been in place since 2014.
The challenge for us on the innovation side is that we're looking at antibiotic alternatives. We need to work with authorities on approving antibiotic alternatives. If we're going to do the research on these alternatives but then we can't get them approved for use here because we're a smaller market or we classify them as drugs versus feed additives, then that research and innovation we're doing is going for naught.
We support the federal action plan on antimicrobial resistance and use in Canada, we're working with government on the next steps, and we're designing our next reduction strategy accordingly. One of the key parts in doing that is the Canadian global food animal residue avoidance data bank. We use gFARAD in order to determine what antibiotics can be used and to make sure there are withdrawal times. It is fully funded by industry. We think there should be a cost-sharing with government. It is not a high-ticket item.
To wrap up, we're in a partnership with you. We're in a partnership with government on food safety, animal care, the environment, what we're doing. We think there is a shared responsibility. We also think there's a shared benefit in what we're doing. That's why we're asking for a shared cost, because it is a partnership as we move forward.
We want to work on our third party audits. We want to see an animal care recognition program in place. We want to innovate and put that in place, and we're looking forward to having further discussion with you in terms of where the framework is going.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.