040164 DNA to Fingerprint Pork From Farm to Table

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada - Canada's largest hog producer and processor has launched a system that can trace back a pork loin on a Japanese meat counter to the farm where the hog was born, and said the system could one day be extended to trace beef and other meat.

The company, Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, said its high-speed DNA database of sows on Canadian farms would help it sell pork to Japanese buyers concerned about food safety by tracing cuts of meat back to producers within hours.

"The Japanese market is critical to the success of the Canadian industry," chief executive Michael McCain told a news conference. "We've engineered our entire system to be as responsive to the Japanese industry as best we can."

He said the system, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, will be up and running for some Western Canadian pork marketed to Japan by the end of 2004.

Japan is the second-largest export market for Canada's pig farmers after the United States, buying pork worth C$605 million ($465 million) in 2001.

But during the first three quarters of 2003, Canada's exports to Japan fell almost 20 percent to 120,650 tonnes from the same period of 2002, federal statistics show.

McCain said the downturn was not explicitly related to concerns about Canadian meat after a case of mad cow disease in May shut Canadian beef out of Japan and other world markets.

"It was more of a short-term market anomaly than anything beyond that," he said.

But he said recent concerns about bird flu in poultry along with a subsequent case of mad cow disease found in the United States has boosted demand for pork.

"There's been a bit of a void that is currently being filled in pork consumption that we are attempting to fill," McCain said.

"Certainly, the absence of a robust traceability system in the beef industry is one of the obstacles to opening that border in the first instance."

Maple Leaf has invested more than C$1 million developing the system, which McCain said would cost a "nominal" 80 Canadian cents per market hog to operate.

The company is talking to other Canadian industry players and government about funding to expand the project, which can also be applied to beef, fish and other products. McCain said Maple Leaf eventually wants to make the system available around the world.

Maple Leaf is working with privately held Pyxis Genomics Inc. of Chicago to build a "gene panel" to accurately trace the DNA back to farms.

Orchid BioSciences Inc. will do the DNA typing using samples supplied by farmers, and IBM's Canadian division will build the computer database for the information.

Under the system, farmers will submit blood or hair samples from their sows to the database, and update it with birth records from their herd.

DNA could be extracted from meat anywhere in the world and compared to the DNA on record, the company said.

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