Thursday 19 April 2012

CFIA - Double Standard on ISA - April 19, 2012

Dear Minister Ashfield and the CFIA

1. The CFIA has a double standard with respect to ISA. This should not happen.

In the Cohen December transcripts Kim Klotins says that the CFIA does not want to find ISA in farmed salmon as its mandate is to keep foreign trade going and negotiate with foreign countries as these countries won't take Canadian farmed salmon with ISA.

Now the CFIA says this about Cooke Aquaculture's ISA salmon:

“Since infectious salmon anaemia [ISA] poses no human health or food safety risk, the facility may explore processing options where available. If processing is not an option, fish are humanely destroyed and disposed of in accordance with provincial and municipal guidelines.”

“There would be no special labelling requirements,” because “There is no human health or food safety risk associated with infectious salmon anaemia.”

This is directly contradictory to its international mandate. On the one hand ISA in Canadian fish needs to be suppressed. On the other, it doesn't matter that Canadian fish has ISA.

2. I have pointed out that international trade is not affected as the USA just eliminated a long standing 26% tariff on Norwegian farmed salmon for dumping salmon. This is at the same time that Norway has had ISA continuously since 1984.

See this: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2011/10/isa-infections-world-wide-sine-1984.html. This post references Kibenge's powerpoint presentation on ISA world wide.

3. As a taxpayer, I do not support using my tax dollars to pay fish farms when their fish have to be destroyed. As one third to one half of all aquaculture products are lost to disease every year (also in the Kibenge document), that means that a lot of my tax dollars are used to bail out billion dollar corporations.

They need their own insurance. Or they need to be on land where their diseases are their own issue.

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