Summary
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is dedicated to safeguarding food, animals and plants, which enhances the health and well-being of Canada's people, environment and economy. The National Chemical Residue Monitoring Program (NCRMP) is an annual CFIA regulatory surveillance program which verifies compliance in certain foods to Canadian standards and guidelines for chemical residues and contaminants. The foods tested come from 7 commodity groups, which are meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy, eggs, honey, maple products and processed fruits and vegetables. The data collected from the NCRMP along with other surveillance activities enables the CFIA to identify trends that may warrant additional control strategies to maintain or improve compliance.
The NCRMP is one of several valuable surveillance tools that the CFIA uses to help ensure the very high compliance of foods to Canadian standards year after year. The NCRMP is carried out in accordance with Codex Alimentarius principles and guidelines and is an important part of the CFIA food safety framework that monitors Canadian food for potential chemical hazards. This program provides data to support the Canadian food production system and the integrity of Canada's chemical residue control system. These systems are equivalent to those of our main trading partners like the United States and the European Union.
In 2014 an initiative known as the Food Safety Oversight (FSO) Program was introduced to complement the NCRMP and to increase CFIA's oversight in the non-meat food sectors. In 2016 the CFIA increased sampling and testing of certain fresh fruit and vegetables that were not typically monitored within the program. These additional FSO program samples have now been incorporated into the routine NCRMP samples and were collected at retail locations by third-party samplers under contract to the CFIA. Sampling foods at federally registered establishments as well as at retail locations offers additional information on levels of residues and contaminants present in foods on the Canadian market.
The CFIA communicates non-compliant results from surveillance activities like the NCRMP to farmers, growers/producers, importers and retailers to identify areas of concern and to promote the safe use of agricultural chemicals and practices. This ongoing effort ensures that safe and healthy food is continuously available to Canadians.
This report summarizes testing results from the NCRMP in food samples collected between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, (hereafter referred to as 2021/22). Over 93,000 tests for residues of veterinary drugs, pesticides, metals and contaminants were performed on approximately 14,500 NCRMP monitoring samples and generated millions of results, which are summarized in Annex B of this report. This amount of sampling and testing was lower than the planned amount due to the COVID-19 global pandemic and resulting resource constraints to deliver on emergency response activities at the CFIA. Despite the reduction in chemical residue testing on domestic and imported food products, the CFIA has confidence in the reported results and conclusions provided in this report. The test results from samples taken as part of the NCRMP showed that the overwhelming majority of food on the market meets Canadian standards for chemical residues. The overall compliance rate was determined to be 97.7% which is slightly higher than compliance in past years.
Detailed test results are available on the Open Government Portal.
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The complete text of this report is available upon request.