Toews spoke of lessons his association had learnt from the BSE incident. He said while he personally wanted less government in his life he realised that could not be at the expense of food safety.
As the country pushed to reopen borders and markets, Toews said the role of government was crucial but so too was the industry’s message to markets and the public.
Everything his association said and did had to be backed by science and had to be factually sound.
“When you start making mandatory industry decisions around a non-science approach it’s a slippery slope.”
At the time of the incident the Canadian government had reduced its trade negotiation capability so as the sector recovered Toews said they could only negotiate the
reopening of borders with one country at a time.
They appealed the refusal of one market to reopen to the World Trade Organisation and that barrier was only removed on the eve of the organisation releasing its report.
A further issue was the United States was not only an important beef market for Canada but also a key beef processor.
Canadian beef packers only had capacity to process 65,000 animals a week but needed 85,000-90,000 a week. US packers met that shortfall but BSE closed that border.
Toews said an additional lesson was to know any inherent weaknesses as a producer. The reliance on US beef packers proved to be a key deficiency.
Plummeting prices were accentuated by reliance on US packers but Toews said the market continued to work.
It was just reflecting the situation on the day. Processing capacity grew in the two years after the disaster to handle 105,000 a day.
Post BSE, Toews said there were now fewer Canadian beef farmers but they were bigger in scale and more competitive.
“We all struggled but we lost a lot of 150-cow sole proprietor operations,” he said.
Canadian cattle man Travis Toews spoke about his experience with BSE at the B+LNZ annual meeting in March.
Today there are many 500 to 1500-cow operations backed by sophisticated business structures that employ people with knowledge on business, animal health and animal nutrition.
Canadian cattle have not changed in type but have improved in productivity in response to market signals, such as better marbling.
Toews was one of many sector leaders in the hot seat during the BSE crisis and he described the last 10 years as a “herculean effort”.
He runs 2500 cattle, including 1400 Angus-Simmental cows, on 4000ha in Alberta and has shown his faith in the beef industry by growing his mother-cow operation from 400 in 2003 to 1400 today.
BSE facts
BSE is a transmissible and fatal neurodegenerative disease that affects cattle. It has a long incubation period, about 2.5 to 8 years, and can affect adult cattle of all breeds usually at four to five years of age. The variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal human neurodegenerative condition, results from exposure to BSE through eating contaminated beef or beef products.
BSE-infected animals entered the human food chain in the United Kingdom before controls on high-risk offal were introduced in 1989. By June, 2014 it had killed 177 people in that country and 52 others around the world.
In February this year, the disease was again detected by Canadian officials in a cow born on an Alberta farm in 2009. Another cow born on the same farm in 2004 tested positive for the disease in 2010. Neither animal had entered the human food chain.
BSE has never been detected in cattle in New Zealand and Australia. The World Organisation for Animal Health recognises both countries as having a negligible BSE risk status.
Source: Food Standards Australia NZ and agencies
