Canada launches African Swine Fever prevention and preparedness program

Nov 18, 2022

No case has ever been found in Canada, but the disease has had a major impact in countries like Asia, Europe and the Carribean.

African Swine Fever is a fatal swine disease.

Earlier this week, Ottawa announced applications are now open for Agriculture Canada's African Swine Fever prevention and preparedness program.

Funding for the new program will support projects such as biosecurity assessments and improvements, wild pig management, the retrofit of existing abattoirs, sector analysis and ASF-related research.

Rick Bergmann, Chair of the Canadian Pork Council says he's pleased to see Ottawa stepping up to help protect the industry.

"The outcome which is most important out of all of this, is that we're able to ensure that we've got a very, very strong position in regards to prevention in our country. Also looking at aspects of if we do get it, ... how do we deal with it and so on. But a lot of focus on prevention."

Bergmann says with 70 per cent of our production destined for export, a single case (ASF) would result in the immediate closure of the border and our export markets.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids