Yes, that's certainly the one that's biggest in our minds as being a disease that perhaps has a reputation it doesn't deserve, and how countries and trade and emotions react to it. That's perhaps instructive for what the pork industry might be going through right now with the H1N1 virus.
With BSE you had a new disease that started appearing in Europe and the U.K. in the late seventies and early eighties, and people didn't know what it was. Animals were just getting sick, and people didn't know why. They started to do some research to learn more about it and found out that people were also getting sick. As the years went by and the research was going on, trade barriers went up and people stopped trading with the U.K., which became the way people and countries dealt with it.
Science moved on, and they learned what it was and how it was spreading and how to control it. But countries—including Canada—still put up trade barriers. Perhaps we were somewhat guilty, too, and had to taste our own medicine, because when we discovered it here, that's also what happened to us. We immediately lost all of our markets in other countries, losing to the tune of $11 million per day, because we do export about 60% of our production.
With that happening, and with the U.S. then getting in the same boat as us, we did manage to address it from the point of view of knowing what to do. We changed regulations in Canada. We made sure that our feed ban was stopping the spread of the disease from animal to animal; it was not contagious, but it was through feed. We adopted some changes in how beef was processed to make sure that the risky parts of the animal containing the agent were not going into the food supply.
So we've done everything to assure the safety of the beef, and we've done other things to ensure the health of the animals. But we still continue to suffer from the economic impact. I think that's the real message here, which is to identify what are the things.... Some of the things we've talked about are real food safety concerns, and you have to make sure you're preventing those and controlling them.
Some of the other things we've talked about are extremely important issues—animal health issues, biosecurity, and disease prevention, and perhaps country-of-origin labelling in terms of marketing—but a lot of these things aren't food safety issues. So we want to make sure that when we're talking about how we respond to these things and what lessons we learned, we're really getting at what the objectives are. If there's a food safety objective, we need to ensure we're addressing it from that perspective.