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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Food tracked from farm to store

By: Larry Kusch

Posted: 01/29/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

The province is setting up a database to trace food products from the farm gate to the grocery shelf in an attempt to address the public's increasing preoccupation with food safety.Agriculture Minister Rosann Wowchuk announced $400,000 in funding to kick-start the initiative during a speech to the annual meeting of Keystone Agricultural Producers in Winnipeg.

She said consumers are demanding more information on where their food comes from, and the food traceability program will help do that.

"Registration will begin with the livestock sector and will be expanded to include all farms that grow food (as well as) processing plants and eventually to all places where food is kept," she told the KAP meeting Wednesday.

The province spent $100,000 piloting the program in co-operation with IBM last year. It will now attempt to identify all livestock farms and track which species are kept on each farm.

Keystone president Ian Wishart said his organization generally supports such a system, but it wants to ensure that the information farmers supply remains confidential and that producers receive assistance to offset the increased costs the program will impose. Such assistance could take the form of tax credits, he said.

Enrolment in the program will be voluntary, but the province hopes farmers and other industry players see the advantages of participating.

Barry Todd, deputy minister of agriculture, said there are commercial as well as public safety advantages from such a database.

Quickly identifying and isolating the source of animal diseases such as avian influenza in poultry and foot and mouth disease can assure international customers that an outbreak is contained, he said.

"If you can confine these diseases very quickly, you save the rest of the industry multi-million dollars as compared to a slow response that allows that disease to spread," Todd said.

The province is working with other jurisdictions to establish a national database, and Todd said all provinces "are keen on moving on this."

In Quebec, whose food tracing system is probably furthest advanced, a beef processing plant was able to take advantage of the database to land a deal with McDonald's, Wishart said.

Tracing food from the farm to the consumers' plate is not new. Various companies, including Winnipeg-based Paterson GlobalFoods, have employed such strategies to access premium markets for their products.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 29, 2009 B6

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