(Ottawa) Ottawa is optimistic that the United States will soon lift the ban that has been in place for more than two months on the important market for table potatoes from Prince Edward Island due to a disease that poses a risk for soil contamination.
Updated yesterday at 11:16 p.m.
The American agency responsible for food inspection, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), will carry out a specific analysis of the risk associated with table potatoes, announced the Minister of Agriculture and Health. Agrifood, Marie-Claude Bibeau, in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Mme Bibeau explained after a meeting Thursday in Washington with the United States Secretary of Agriculture and the head of the agency responsible for plant safety, that Secretary Tom Vilsack “understood the issue, the urgency” and “clearly instructed” the APHIS team to “prioritize the issue” of table potatoes from Prince Edward Island.
He would have promised that an analysis of potatoes destined for Puerto Rico – which represents a quarter of the island’s exports to the United States – will be completed “within a week or two”, said the minister, and that analysis for the rest of the United States will also be prioritized, but may take a few more weeks.
Until now, the American agency dealt with the entire file of potato wart on Prince Edward Island, i.e. seed potatoes, processing potatoes and potatoes of table soil, although the levels of risk were different.
The US Secretary’s directive to conduct a specific table potato risk analysis “gives very good hope” that the US market will be reopened very soon, the minister said.
“Obviously, we have to let the American agency do its analysis, but when I see how confident Canadian scientists are in the mitigation measures we have put in place, that gives me reason to believe and hope that American scientists are also going to agree that the risks are so small,” she explained.
Table potatoes sold domestically and that Ottawa wants to be able to export again pose “a very negligible risk” since they come from land that is not known to have been contaminated, are washed, brushed and treated with an inhibitor of sprouting.
The entire analysis of 30,000 soil samples will have to be done to restore the seed potato market, that is, the one that is intended to be planted for the production of potatoes. This one cannot leave the island. It is prohibited elsewhere in Canada.
On November 22, the United States ordered its border services not to allow potatoes from Prince Edward Island until further notice, after the discovery of apple wart. of land in two fields in the province. Therefore, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency cannot certify them until they meet the requirements.
A month later, the Government of Canada has provided $28 million in support to help PEI farmers cope with the growing potato surplus linked to the export ban .
The minister explained Thursday that she had done “a lot, a lot of work” to reassure the Americans that table potatoes from the island can be exported without risk, given all the mitigation measures put in place.
Earlier Thursday, the Conservative Party (CCP) blamed the Liberal government for doing nothing meaningful to fix the ban
Three MPs, Richard Lehoux, John Barlow and Dave Epp, have expressed the view that the Liberal government is failing to defend what they call Prince Edward Island’s world-class potatoes and is seriously harming to Canada’s reputation on the international stage.
However, Conservative MPs argue that farm families, generational farms and the province continue to feel the devastating effects of the federal government’s dithering.