Canada's food safety lacks farm-to-fork traceability
Overall, we rank behind U.K., Denmark and Australia

By Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service
June 3, 2010 The Vancouver Sun


Despite a sharpened focus on food safety in Canada after the 2008 listeriosis crisis, the quality of the country's food-safety system remains essentially unchanged, a newly published ranking concludes.

Overall, Canada nudged up a spot in the international foodsafety rankings of 17 countries, to tie the United States for fourth spot and to earn accolades as "one of the best-performing countries" in the 2010 Food Safety Performance World Ranking study.

Denmark, Australia and the United Kingdom came out on top, while Italy, France and Ireland rounded out the bottom of the 2010 ranking.

In 2008, Canada was fifth in the ranking of member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In 2010, Canada received the same overall "superior" grade. Of the four major areas assessed, Canada earned the same grade in three but dropped to a grade of "poor" in the area of traceability, which tracks food throughout the supply chain.

Sylvain Charlebois, the associate director of the University of Regina's graduate school of public policy, said the positive bump for Canada is a result of a few countries falling behind rather than marked domestic improvements.

"Basically, Canada has moved up one because some have moved down. So Canada is performing equally well -- that's probably how I would qualify it. My sense is that many countries do have a lot of work to do, but when you compare Canada with everyone else, Canada does quite well," said Charlebois, who conducted the comparative study.

Since the 2008 rankings were published, Canada's food safety system was shaken by the listeriosis outbreak of August 2008. Twenty-two Canadians, mostly elderly living in long-term care facilities, died after consuming tainted deli meats produced at a federally regulated plant operated by Maple Leaf Foods.

In the wake of the outbreak, the federal government committed $75 million to implement the recommendations of Sheila Weatherill, the independent investigator brought in to identify the gaps in the system that led to the outbreak. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has also spent part of the $113 million earmarked in 2008 to improve food and consumer safety through the Food and Consumer Safety Action Plan.

If Weatherill's recommendations are implemented and Canada fixes its food traceability problems, Charlebois said, Canada can raise its global food safety ranking from superior to the best in the world.

"The study's objective is to look at policy, and policy does take time to implement, of course," said Charlebois.

According to the 2010 ranking, Canada does an excellent job at governance and recalls, ranking No. 1 in this category. It considers risk-management plans, the level of clarity of food recall regulations and the number of recalls.

Canada ranks second in consumer affairs, which measures incidence of reported illness by food-borne pathogens, rates of inspections and audits, foodsafety education programs, labelling and indications of allergens and ease of access to public health information.

But Canada falls down on traceability in the food chain, ranked at the bottom alongside the United States. "Canada and the U.S. do not have well-established farm-to-fork traceability systems for any food product," the report states, noting Canada is the only country to earn a lower grade in this area in 2010 compared with 2008.

"While it does have a tracking system for its livestock industry, [it] is still developing a farm-to-fork traceability system."

Canada also lags behind many countries on biosecurity, which measures the rate of use of agricultural chemicals and bioterrorism strategy. Canada ranked 11th in this area.

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