Industry News

Seventeen Years Later, BSE Nightmare May be Ending by Jeff Gaye

Canada’s long national BSE nightmare might finally be nearing its end.

The immediate fallout from the discovery of a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease”) in a beef cow in 2003 was devastating to Canada’s livestock industry. The effects are still being felt in our international trade.

By the standards of the World Organization for Animal Health (known by the French acronym OIE), Canada’s current status is “controlled risk” for BSE.

The Canada Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has applied to have the status changed to the most favourable ranking, “negligible risk.” A country may apply for negligible-risk status 11 years after the birth of its most recent case.

According to David Moss, general manager of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA), CFIA broke new ground working together with the industry to assemble a robust application.

“This is the first time CFIA has done this, in recent times anyway,” Moss said.

The agency turned to many stakeholders and sectors within the industry to build their submission—feed mills, renderers, packing plants, and producer organizations including the CCA.

“The submission is made to OIE by CFIA, as the responsible regulator, but assistance with collecting of data, submission of the marketing data, and communication of data, and just all different aspects of the application, we worked together on,” he said.

“And it was a resounding success.”

Moss says the intensive industry-wide effort assembled an excellent submission that was ready well in advance of the OIE deadline. “The submission was due at the end of July, and we were done and ready to go probably by the end of June. We submitted early and had it in OIE’s hands at least two weeks before the deadline,” he said.

OIE will now study the submission, and may return to CFIA with questions. This would normally be expected in September or October, notwithstanding OIE’s own challenges dealing with Covid-19 restrictions.

At that point, CFIA has just 24 hours to respond. Moss says the whole industry is ready to move quickly if OIE has questions about the application.

“The team is kind of on standby. And if we get a request from OIE it’s all people on deck,” he said.

The next step is an OIE subcommittee review before the application goes before the OIE main body. Moss says he expects a decision around May 2021.

As an OIE member, Canada is represented by CFIA appointees at the subcommittee level and in the deciding body. These people will not be eligible to participate in the decision-making process for Canada’s application, but Moss said they were able to advise CFIA and its industry partners and help build their strong submission.

One possible snag is the difference between Europe and North America on the handling of specific-risk material, or SRM, from beef carcasses. Despite the differences, Moss says both processes are valid and he expects the science will carry the day.

Canada’s BSE status to date has been a technical barrier rather than a reputational one as far as international trade is concerned, Moss says. If anything, Canada’s up-front handling of its BSE crisis has cemented its positive reputation as an honest trader. “It’s typical of us as Canadians, we follow rules quite well. Just look how we’re dealing with our pandemic in comparison to other countries,” he said.

“From the BSE perspective, we’ve always been above and beyond the global testing requirements, and the tests that we’ve written for BSE are more robust than other countries. We have a four-factor BSE test versus the two-factor. You add all these things together and our reputation globally for genetics and meat quality and eating experience is extremely high.”

He said Canada’s SRM removal protocols gained us international credibility, and our own consumers’ confidence in our products after the BSE discovery was unprecedented.

“Canada was the first country in the world to get BSE and have beef consumption go up. It never happened before,” he said.

“Again, it’s our ability to communicate to our consumers that there’s strict quality and safety controls in place in Canada.”

Should OIE approve the negligible-risk application, Canada will be able to make up some ground in markets like South Korea.

Currently, as trade agreements with that country progress, the US has a slight tariffrate advantage over Canada and is one year ahead on tariff reductions. Canadian beef that is exported to the US, and then sold to South Korea, has to be segregated from the US “negligible-risk” beef. This results in significant discounting of the price of the Canadian product.

Add to that the additional high-risk material that must be removed from Canadian beef carcasses because of our controlled-risk designation, and the disadvantage becomes even more severe.

“It’s referred to in ‘street wording’ as longlist versus short-list SRM products. The