Canada-Beef Traceability not working.

CANADA-

TRACEABILITY IN BEEF.

Special equipment installed at the Atlantic Beef Products plant on P.E.I. for tracing meat from retail stores back to the farm isn’t working properly and never did, the province is now admitting.

Atlantic Beef Products is the only federally inspected beef plant in the Maritimes. When it opened in 2005 the tracing system, purchased at a cost of $1.5 million, was described as "state-of-the-art" and touted as an important marketing tool in this era of fears about bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

"One would assume if you would put your money down and you buy equipment or a product that it should work," Agriculture Minister George Webster told CBC News Monday.

"Once in a while you try something and it doesn’t make the grade and that was obviously one piece of equipment that didn’t."

John Thompson, president of Atlantic Beef Products, said the equipment was slowing down the productivity of the plant. About half the equipment is still being used, and the rest is up for sale.

"The current system isn’t as accurate," said Thompson.

"We have a very good sort of process, production flow. We’re fairly certain when we have the labelling on and everything else, we’re fairly certain we can track the animal back to the producers themselves."

Apart from technical problems with the system, the plant was never going to be able to trace meat back from the consumer’s plate directly to the farm, said Thompson, because retailers use different tracking systems that don’t connect to the codes put on by processors.