Good evening, everyone.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.
I will start off with an overview of biosecurity in Quebec's pork industry and then finish with a brief analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.
Biosecurity comprises all measures designed to reduce disease transmission. It is also the foundation of our business. Canada enjoys an animal health situation that is the envy of the world, and that privileged situation has enabled us to become a leading global exporter. We export some 70% of what we produce. Countries such as Spain and Brazil have become major competitors too as a result of animal health improvements made in those countries.
We are dealing with three main types of health threats: reportable diseases such as African swine fever, or ASF, emerging diseases such as porcine epidemic diarrhea, and endemic diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS, or influenza. Each disease has its own characteristics and therefore its own biosecurity measures framework.
Biosecurity can be developed country-wide, across Canada, a region, a hog operation or at a farm site.
Improving the health of our herds in Quebec is central to our industry's strategic plan. We have established a provincial organization through which we can discuss health issues, and we are working hard to develop an ASF emergency plan that's actually quite advanced.
Many other organizations operate in the maintenance and improvement of swine health in Quebec. Given our biosecurity strengths, Canada's favourable geographic situation is clearly an asset.
There are no wild pigs in Quebec, which isn't the case in the rest of Canada. Even though we are sometimes inadequately funded, our business ecosystem focusing on health issues and our disease monitoring capabilities are some of our strengths. Our vaccine research and production capabilities are as well. We will soon be deploying an influenza vaccine based on porcine strains circulating in Quebec.
Our degree of biosecurity compliance has distinctly improved. Since 2017, we have conducted more than 1,100 biosecurity audits at our facilities and several dozens of others in our transportation businesses. Our success in systematically eradicating all porcine epidemic diarrhea contaminations has been one of our strengths.
As for our weaknesses, Canada must strive to reduce the costs associated with medication and vaccine approvals. It must also do more to control our borders to prevent ASF from being introduced into Canada.
I would remind you that, despite all the efforts we have remain disease-free, two major diseases from Asia have been introduced into Canada in the past decade, including, in particular, porcine epidemic diarrhea.
In addition, there are reasonable grounds to question whether it is appropriate to designate ASF as a reportable disease. To provide some context, it must be understood that a single case of ASF among any branch of the suidae family in Canada—and that includes pets, for example—would destroy my industry and result in the humanitarian slaughter of half the hogs in Canada. That would include healthy hogs that would be unmarketable because we wouldn't be able to export them. It must be understood that the rules respecting this disease would be more consequential than the disease itself, which is unacceptable.
To limit this kind of human and economic disaster, we must have functional trade zoning agreements enabling us to recover our export capacity in the space of a few days. However, we don't have that at the present time.
Under the agreement that we've signed with the United States, implementation times are too long and subject to a potential political decision. The agreement we have reached with the European Union is subject to non-tariff barriers. We must also sign compartmentalization agreements, and funding will be needed to implement them.
At the provincial and even national level, transportation is still the weak link, despite all previous efforts. We need more cleaning and drying stations across the country.
At the regional level, distances among our farms aren't always enough to prevent certain diseases such as PRRS and influenza from spreading via aerosols. The costs to install filtration systems need to be lowered.
We need to continue complying with biosecurity protocols in our businesses, and we are striving to improve this aspect. The digitization of our industry would be a lever that would help improve compliance with those protocols.
Thank you very much.
We will be pleased to answer your questions.
