"All peril" hog mortality insurance on drawing board

Monday Nov 15 2010
by www.manitobacooperator.ca staff

The Canadian Swine Health Board aims to have a new "all peril" mortality insurance product ready for pork producers by the new year.

The board has confirmed it's working with the pork industry groups in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec to develop a national mortality insurance product.

The package is being modeled after a program developed for the poultry industry in response to avian flu, the board said, and is meant to cover mortality from disease as well as from causes such as fire and equipment failure.

"Certainly the pork industry and its producers will benefit because they will have a protection that is not only not currently in place but it literally isn't in place anywhere in the world," Deborah Whale, insurance committee chair with the Ontario Livestock and Poultry Council, said on the industry-sponsored program Farmscape recently.

"But it seems to me there's a lot of value here for government, and when I say government I mean taxpayers, because we have an industry then that will have a stable mortality protection."

Products have been developed for weaners, growers and sows for completion in January 2011, Whale said, noting that in the future such programs could be extended to boars and to other sectors of the industry.

The program will also have a biosecurity standard that needs to be maintained "at all times," she told Farmscape's Bruce Cochrane.

"When you enhance biosecurity and you maintain it on your farm, farm by farm, you do a great deal to limit the spread of disease, to even limit the introduction of disease to the pork industry, and so I think it's going to have a major effect in the long term."

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