BSE crisis was caused by lack of vision, Gracey says

TORONTO — Both the beef industry and the government showed lack of vision when they allowed a manageable disease like BSE to deliver an almost fatal blow against the Canadian beef industry.

"BSE today is something less consequential than foot rot," says Charlie Gracey, one of the authors of the 10-year vision by the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association.

He says the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) knew that BSE was in Canada as early as the 1980s and assessed the risk as one of two possibilities. In one, the risk would be negligible, in the other catastrophic. The effect on the health of the beef and dairy herds has been negligible but the economic impact has been devastating.

"CFIA gambled and we lost," said Gracey in an interview with Farmers Forum.

What’s more, Canada had the opportunity to appeal to the OIE, the international body that had ruled Canada a minimal risk country at the beginning of the crisis. Canada could have launched a countervail, Gracey said, but chose instead to negotiate with the U.S.

He says Canada made another mistake, allowing the CFIA to act as science body as well as the regulator. An independent body of scientists should have been designated, he argues. He says SARS struck at the same time as BSE but was managed to a standstill in a very short time. The problems with BSE seemed to mingle interminably.

The struggle to regain access to American markets will continue, he says, pointing out that the U.S. regulation requiring live animals crossing the border to have a birth certificate is a way of blocking trade, as is country of origin labelling. "We did sign a free trade agreement," he says, inferring that you wouldn’t know it by looking at the cattle flow.

Canada sent about 50 per cent of its product to the U.S.and industry and government are now going to have to look for markets outside the U.S.

"We have to sell this product," he says. "We’re not going to sell a lot more at home."

Gracey suggests moving into the Asian markets, finding out what they want and giving it to them.

However, Canada has shipped a large number of cattle south in 2007 accounting for an increase in farm cash receipts of more than four per cent. Up to Nov. 17 this year, Canada shipped 435,000 feeder cattle and 726,000 fed cattle to the U.S.

In the first two weeks since the border opened on Nov. 19, Canada shipped 3,000 cows and bulls, 1,500 per week, to the United States.

Gracey, former manager of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association recently, spoke recently to farmers in Renfrew, Kemptville and Selby.