EID plan will cut paperwork
Stricter identification and registration of bovine animals and labelling of beef and beef products arrived in the late 1990s, as one of the measures to re-establish consumer confidence in beef and beef products after the BSE crisis.
Since then, throughout the EU, all notifications of births, deaths, and animal movements must be manually registered by farmers, and converted in an electronic format into the national computerised database.
The main aim is to enable localisation and tracing of individual animals for veterinary purposes, as a tool for control of infectious diseases.
However, the heavy paperwork burden has been the subject of concern and criticism by farmers. In Ireland, they live in dread of making mistakes when doing the paperwork on the country’s 6.5 million or so cattle, because errors could lead to cuts in the Single Farm Payment on which so many farmers depend heavily for income.
The European Commission says the administrative burden will be reduced, and the current procedures simplified, by their latest proposal — to introduce, for the first time and on a voluntary basis, an electronic identification system (EID) for bovine animals (although the proposal allows member states to introduce a mandatory regime at national level).
Bovine EID is already used in several EU member states and other countries worldwide on a private basis, mainly for farm management purposes.
The commission says its implementation on a wider scale will strengthen the traceability system for bovine animals and for food products such as beef, making it faster and more accurate. Consumers would be protected by better and faster traceability of infected animals and/or infected food.
Scope to improve animal breeding and production management is also envisaged. Labour costs could be reduced across the board, including meat processing establishments and traders of live animals.
There is no doubt that the existing cattle traceability system can be improved. There was a high-profile failure this year, when one of England’s largest pedigree dairy herds was fined more than £7,000 for various breaches of animal identification and movement laws. Cattle were moved between premises run by the farming company without appropriate disease testing or paperwork. As in Ireland, all cattle in Britain must have passports, and 58 passports were found on the premises of the fined farmer for cattle that died. This was a very bad advertisement for EU cattle traceability, which is a touchy subject between countries worldwide which compete on the dairy and beef products markets.
Experience in Canada has shown that radio frequency identification (RFID) ear tags did a good job for keeping track of animals. Canada started requiring farmers to ear tag their cattle in 2001. The RFID tags allow for electronic storage and reading of data, and can’t be lost or ripped out of the ear easily, because they are so small.
In fact, if they are injected or in a bolus, they are foolproof enough to detect stolen cattle with a hand-held scanner.
But even voluntary cattle EID in the EU is some distance away, because the commission proposal goes next for lengthy deliberation by the European Parliament and the Council. That gives Ireland plenty of time to formulate a policy. Meanwhile, IFA says EID-based traceability is totally unworkable for sheep, and would be a nightmare in terms of penalties, but ICOS, representing co-op marts, recommends all sheep, except lambs under 12 months be EID tagged on leaving the holdings of origin. According to ICOS, EID is an opportunity for the Irish sheep sector to differentiate its offering to consumers. Differentiation is even more important for our huge beef exports, and we should bear that in mind when considering the voluntary bovine EID proposal.
