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Time for the Meat Industry to Solve Animal Traceability (2 comments)
Posted: Thursday, February 25th, 2010By David Acheson
The recent decision by the USDA to abandon the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) has met with some surprise and concern in the food community. Questions of whether this means the administration is backing of traceability programs have arisen, as have concerns as to what the USDA will come up with to replace the NAIS.
Speculation around the true reasons behind the USDA decision on animal traceability abounds but at the end of the day the NAIS approach was not achieving the needed goals so something had to change. The key question in my mind is whether this is about food safety or trade – or a mixture of the two. Being realistic, creating not tariff trade barriers can do major harm in many ways and is not only problematic for the business community but will effectively be almost impossible to implement due to passive resistance – however much the law may require it. Thus the “wrong” solution will fail on both counts – food safety and trade.
So what is the optimal solution that will have a positive impact on food safety and a neutral effect on trade (at the very least)? That is the big question and I have not seen a good answer, but suggest that the following are some of the key attributes that need to be in such as system.
• The ability to know where animals have come from when they move out of state
• The need for key data elements that need to be captured at each step of the way as animals move around out of state.
• The importance of a national interoperable system – you can have different systems but they must be able to talk to each other.
• Ensuring the information is kept electronically and is fast to access when needed.
One of the worst outcomes of this would be multiple systems that don’t communicate with each other. If that happens one can almost guarantee that food safety will not be protected and trade will suffer.
We are in a global food market place and need to think and act globally with regard to both food safety and trade. This is the time for the leaders of the meat industry step up to the plate and develop solutions that work and not wait of for the regulators to come up with the answer.
2 Responses to “Time for the Meat Industry to Solve Animal Traceability”
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[...] Managing Director of the Food and Import Safety Practice, shares his perspective in his latest blog here. News Time for the Meat Industry to Solve the Animal Traceability Problem USDA recently [...]
The optimal solution remarks above will bring about a lasting effect on food safety in the meat animal industry. Movement of animals is the basic for food safety just like produce or processed foods. By using the ScoringAg database, key data elements are the norm running in a interoperable UNIX database that is International. World trade needs a common thread of information. Data tracking needs to be in real-time as per trading partners need for source verification as per the ScoringAg web-based database for checking of product data like antibotics used along with feeding and quality grades and any disease issues for meat shipments. ScoringAg has developed solutions that work and did not wait for the regulators to come up with the answer.