Dive Brief:
- Two Canadian think tanks are advocating a cross-border cooperative food protection system between the U.S. and Canada. The proposal was released to coincide with the third round of talks of NAFTA negociations, which opened Sept. 23 in Ottawa.
- The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute and the Canada Institute of the Wilson Center said it is a critical time for a conversation on protecting and improving the shared food supply chain.
An eight-page position paper laying out the idea came from Rory McAlpine, senior vice president of government and industry relations for Maple Leaf Foods in Toronto, and Mike Robach, vice president of corporate food safety and regulatory affairs for Cargill in Minneapolis.
We do things better when we do them together
Dive Insight:
There is already a Canada-U.S. Regulatory Cooperation Council to coordinate on food safety, meat inspection and animal/plant health matters, but this new proposal claims that even though the council was “a good start,” tangible benefits have been few. They say more progress would come by combining the risk assessment functions of both countries’ food safety regulatory agencies into a formal institutional partnership to deliver the best possible science at the earliest stage of decision-making and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and duplicative effort.
Read complete article: Is NAFTA 2.0 the place for a US-Canada joint food safety agreement? | FoodDive