No Brainer: Mad Sheep, Crazy Women and Blinded Bureaucrats

Martha McMahon

In October 2003, the Ministry of Health Planning Protection and the BC Centre for Disease Control introduced new meat inspection regulations under the Food Safety Act, to govern the processing of animals for food in British Columbia. The new regulations came into effect on September 01, 2004. Abattoirs and meat processing facilities will have a two-year transition period to implement changes to adopt the new Food Safety Act regulations. It will be mandatory by September 01, 2006 to have all animals for food production processed within a provincially approved and licensed facility. Currently, inspected and approved abattoir facilities do not exist on the Gulf Islands. Much of the meat produced on the Gulf Islands is sold through direct farm markets and these markets are important to local economies and tourism. It could result in the loss of important local island products such as Salt Spring Island lamb.

Although the new meat regulations were often presented in the media as a health and food safety initiative, the local BC public consultation process and other coinciding events reveal that the new initiative is as much about the BSE crisis, the live cattle US export trade, and consolidating and expanding a Canadian meat processing industry to compete internationally. This understanding emerged from the local farmer-ministry-insustry consultation meetings I attended. When questioned by local farmers at one of the initial meetings, Ministry of Health and Min. of Ag spokespersons could not cite a single death in the Provide attributable to uninspected beef or lamb in the last 10 years, and when contacted, the Ministries could provide no data on reported cases of food related illnesses from local uninspected meat. The new meat regulations initiative appeared to gain its urgency from the closing of the US border to Canadian live cattle and beef after the tracing of a single case of BSE to an Alberta farm in (date). Ministry spokespersons at public consultation sessions made it clear that BC’s Provincial Government wanted to introduce a single set of standards for all the slaughter and processing of all animals to be used for food in BC. In most cases, pre- and post-mortem (check if both) inspections would be carried out not by Provincial inspectors but by Federal inspectors, thus easing the way for the introduction of one set of Federal standards nation wide - which in turn would be harmonized with USDA standards. In this sense, the BC Food-Safety initiative was to be part of series of government regulatory moves that would, a) forced all future meat processing into facilities that required considerable capital investment and would thus concentrate the Canadian industry and would also b) further integrate US and Canadian agricultural and food processing industries to create a single homogenized market for industrially produced food.

On the one hand, the move to mandate new Canadian Federal meat regulations that are harmonized with USDA standards can be seen as a reasonable strategy to address the live cattle industry crisis in Alberta due to the closing of the border – by developing Canadian indigenous industrial meat processing facilities that are competitive with those in US.

On the other hand, the BC farmers most adversely affected by the new BC regulations are small scale farmers, very often women farmers and organic farmers, who sell their locally processed lamb to local customers at farm gate. Meeting the new regulations would force these small scale farmers into using industrial slaughtering facilities that are neither geographically available nor ethically acceptable. Even if they were available, being forced into dependency on an industrial processing system undermines the economic advantages of selling locally, as large plants will not want to do custom cut and wrap or deal with a lot of small individual customers. The double irony of the new regulatory efforts to deal with the meat export and BSE crisis is that the lamb processed at local uninspected facilities will neither enter the commercial nor export markets and thus will never occasion the US border to be closed, and, of course, sheep do not get BSE. Nor typically do organically raised cattle.
Drawing heavily on narrative accounts of the efforts of 3 women farmers to save their small scale farms and their livestock, this paper will use the case study of the new BC meat regulations to examine the role of the BC government in creating institutional barriers to local efforts to develop organic and locally oriented sustainable agriculture on Southern Vancouver Island.

Full Paper

Source
Presented at the Social Research in Organic Agriculture Symposium. Guelph, Ontario. January 2005


Author Location and Affiliation
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, mcmahon@uvic.ca


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