U.S. slow to implement cattle-tracking system
Posted on Sunday, June 25, 2006
When the first U. S. case of mad-cow disease was discovered in December 2003, then-Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman pledged to hasten creation of a national identification system for tracing livestock quickly during a disease outbreak. She said she asked the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s chief information officer “to make it his top priority.” Today, more than two years later, the U. S. still has no national ID system for most farm animals, including chickens and beef cattle.
The USDA, which has been discussing a system for nearly a decade — and has spent $ 84. 7 million to develop it — now says one will begin operating next year. Although the agency expects nearly all newborn farm animals to be included in the system by 2009, it has abandoned the idea of mandatory participation, leaving critics to cast doubt on that projection.
As recently as April 2005, the USDA’s draft plan for a national ID system called for mandatory participation. But USDA officials insist the agency was never committed to that idea, and that in response to industry feedback they decided to go with a voluntary system. They express confidence that market forces, including pressure from big beef buyers and export markets, will help drive cattle owners to register their animals.
“I believe the industry as a whole does understand and believe that a system is needed and they will participate,” said John Clifford, the USDA’s chief veterinary officer. He said the agency will review making the system mandatory if participation isn’t adequate.
An ID system would assign each animal a unique number, and record all its movements as it travels to new ranches, farms or other destinations. This tracking information could prove critical in controlling outbreaks of contagious diseases because it would allow investigators to quickly locate animals that were exposed to ones al- ready known to be infected. The USDA’s goal is to be able to trace animals within 48 hours.
But the ID issue has stirred up debate with livestock raisers’ trade groups pitted against one another and a fast-growing grass-roots movement that opposes any tracking system. Many ranchers, meanwhile, worry that animal-welfare groups will get hold of the data if the government runs the system. But after considering one type of privatized tracking system, the USDA changed course when faced with opposition, including complaints from some cattlemen that such a database might be used to manipulate beef prices. Now the agency is pitching a voluntary system with multiple private databases.
A number of animal-health experts and several former USDA officials scoff at a voluntary system. They believe many ranchers and farmers, particularly those fearing legal liability if their animals are found to be diseased, will participate only if the system is mandatory. They also warn that a voluntary system will be inadequate for containing potentially devastating diseases like foot-and-mouth that are far more contagious than mad cow.
“If it isn’t mandatory, it simply will not work,” said Bobby Acord, who until April 2004 ran the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. “There are not enough market forces to make it happen.” Acord is now a consultant to the National Pork Producers Council, which favors a mandatory system. There is already one in place for swine in interstate commerce, and the group says it works.
One current economic incentive hasn’t convinced many beef sellers that a tracking system pays. McDonald’s Corp. offers several cents per pound extra to U. S. producers who can provide information that allows the chain to trace the origin of its beef products. But the company, which supports a mandatory tracking system, has been disappointed with the number of producers taking its offer, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The lack of a national tracking system may already be hurting U. S. beef exports, which suffered after the discovery in the U. S. of mad cow.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently told a meeting of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association that beef exporters like Australia are “aggressively marketing traceability to gain an advantage,” according to the group’s newspaper. “Competitors are out there saying, ‘We’ve got ID. They don’t. ”’ In recent years, about 40 countries — including Canada, Britain, Japan and lesser-developed nations like Namibia and Botswana — have implemented some form of mandatory, national animal-tracking systems covering cattle.
Smaller-scale USDA and state animal ID programs already have helped combat specific diseases. But they’re sometimes in place only until the health risk ebbs. In the 1990 s, an ID system for cattle played a key role in stemming a disease in domestic herds called brucellosis, which can also spread to humans and cause severe fever, weight loss and other debilitating symptoms. With the disease rate now low, most ranchers are no longer required to tag their animals.
With mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, tracking is crucial because the illness is known to spread from cow to cow via contaminated feed. Lacking an effective way to trace cattle, the USDA failed to locate all of the potentially infected cattle linked to the 2003 mad-cow case and two subsequent ones in the U. S.
In the most recent infection — a red beef cow in Alabama that tested positive in March — officials, using DNA tests, investigated 36 farms and five auction houses to try to figure out where it was born and what happened to its herd mates. They couldn’t.
A herd mate from this animal “ could be entering a slaughterhouse tomorrow and we would never know because they don’t have that tracking system in place,” said Caroline Smith De-Waal, food-safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D. C.-based consumer group. Scientists generally agree that humans can contract the fatal, brain-wasting disorder by eating meat from infected animals. Worldwide, more than 150 people have died from the human form of mad-cow, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, although none of the deaths has been linked to U. S. beef.
A number of past participants in USDA animal-ID planning blame some of the delay in establishing a system on bitter feuding within the livestock industry. Trade associations have argued over who will control the data — the government or private organizations — as well as what information will be collected, who can access it and who will pay for the system.
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