The effort to develop a mortality insurance programme for the swine industry began about 10 years ago in response to the devastation caused by Porcine Circovirus, primarily in Ontario and Quebec.

Andrew Dickson, the general manager of Manitoba Pork, said the aim is to try and reduce the volatility in the pork industry using insurance products and federal and provincial governments have identified this as a priority item.

Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork:

We've arrived at a point now where the provinces which are responsible for the development and delivery of agricultural insurance products in Canada, with the support of the federal government, have attempted to do different approaches on this.

Manitoba is the lead on it, and by the end of last year, 2014, we finally had a product that we took to a group of producers to try and test market.

While the premiums were good and the coverages were reasonable in terms of dollar values, the real issue was because of the high deductibles that were put into the programme, as a result of an administrative set of policies laid out by the federal and provincial governments some years ago, the deductibles are so high that essentially a producer wouldn't be able to make a claim in 20 years based on statistical averages and so, while it was a good programme, if you're not going to be able to make a claim there was no point in moving forward.

Mr Dickson said, because of the way legislation is written in various provinces and federally we need to rethink how we do insurance in livestock.

He said that actually there was a product in place at the end of last year but because of the issues with it we have to go back to the drawing board and see how we can change some of the numbers.