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USDA to establish voluntary animal ID program
By Larry Dreiling
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will establish a voluntary national animal identification program this summer, but officials believe the program will eventually have to be mandatory if it is to be completely effective, USDA chief economist Keith Collins said recently, prior to the April 27 announcement of the steps USDA will take to implement the program.
"Focusing on cattle, it's our view the industry is so diverse geographically and in size and so complex, is so disparate in the way people keep their records and manage their animals, it would have been hopeless to try and mandate something out of the box," Collins said. "So we thought the way to go is with a voluntary program and ramp that up over time.
"Down the road at some point, we have said that we would expect such a program to become mandatory and have to go through proposed rulemaking and have to find the means to implement a mandatory system. But we will start out with a voluntary system and learn how to work it as we ramp it up and discover the different circumstances that producers around the country find themselves in."
Addressing the annual meeting of the North American Agricultural Journalists, Collins said the initial voluntary system will apply to cattle and sheep, but will also be open to hogs and other species.
The initial best estimate of the program's cost for a system for all species is $550 million over five years, Collins said. President Bush has asked for $33 million for an animal ID system in the fiscal year 2005 federal budget. In addition, Collins said USDA has asked the Office of Management and Budget for funding to use this fiscal year to begin implementing the system. Collins expects OMB to respond to that request within a few weeks.
However, the federal government does not expect to pick up the full cost of an animal identification system, Collins said. State governments and the private sector--producers, packers and others--will be expected to pay a share.
"The program has got to be cost-effective," Collins said. "We need to use least-cost technology, to give producers the opportunity to use existing systems for identification. We also want to be technology neutral. We've had a many vendors come to us and try to sell us lock, stock and barrel a national identification technology system. We are not buying a system. It will be producers and the industry that will buy this system.
"We don't care if that means a producer keeps records in a spiral bound notebook or if it's RF (radio frequency) ID or under the skin or any other system that is out there or might emerge. We are interested in is capturing data at the federal level."
Collins also stressed that even though the discovery of mad cow disease has been an impetus to the implementation of an animal identification system, an ID system will not by itself reduce the risk of mad cow disease or any other disease. He said the major benefit from an animal identification system would be quicker traceback in the case of disease and the likelihood that fewer animals would have to be killed in an epidemic.
This summer USDA will develop cooperative agreements with states or groups of states to develop a system to interface with "allocators"--groups or institutions around the country that have experience in animal identification programs that will issue group lot numbers for groups of animals as well as ID numbers for individual animals.
The allocators will then be the "repositories" of the animal identification information. As soon as those groups are named, Collins said producers would have an opportunity to register their farms, ranches or other animal premises and then to register their animals.
"Into the repository would go the movement data of the animals," Collins said. "Every time an animal goes from one premise to another premise that movement would be reported to the repository."
USDA lawyers have determined that as long as the program remains voluntary, the animal identification information would not be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, Collins said. However, if the program becomes mandatory, Congress would need to pass special legislation to protect propriety information.
"The sooner that would happen, the sooner we could run such a program," Collins said.
Collins said many producers are worried about the confidentiality of the information collected under an animal ID program, but they are often confused between questions of liability and confidentiality. Many producers may already be liable, Collins said, and it is unclear what implications further information would have on their legal positions. Further information would not necessarily increase that liability, Collins explained.
"We're on the road toward implementing a national system," Collins said. "That creates a lot of anxiety because we haven't said a lot about this to the public. I'm sure the National Cattlemen's Beef Association is trembling waiting to see what we are going to drop on them in terms of a path forward."
Meanwhile, Stephen Sundlof, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, told the journalists a final decision had not yet been made on the content of animal feeds to be allowed in the future.
"We will modify the feed regulations commensurate with the risk and continue on with our effort to ensure compliance with (the ruminant feed ban)," Sundlof said.
Sundlof also said FDA is stepping up performance of spot inspections of animal feeding sites to ensure compliance of the ban.
"Our theory is if you control it at the top of the pyramid, that is the renderers and the feed mills, then the problems downstream should be minimal. There are places at the farm level where mistakes can occur where people are feeding both cattle and other livestock and for one reason or another they decide they are going to feed their cattle chicken feed," Sundlof said.
"That happened in Canada with the first case of (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) there. When they traced out the beef, they found out there was noncompliance at the farm level. There are approximately 1 million cattle feeders in the U.S. We can't get to inspect every one of those folks but we will get a representative sample."
In another session with the journalists, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman said she had received a letter from former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, R- Kan., asking USDA to reconsider its decision to not let Creekstone Farms conduct 100 percent BSE testing "because her son is a cattle rancher who sells to Creekstone."
Creekstone had petitioned USDA to allow it to test all its animals so it could resume selling beef to Japan. USDA has refused. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is testing 100% of its beef animals intended for human consumption and has demanded the United States conduct the same level of testing if U.S. beef is to be sold in Japan.
"We'd like to see a reopening of the market and to do it based on sound science," Veneman said. "Our scientists don't think 100% testing is justified. What we need to do is take this dispute to the (Organization for Animal Inspection) in good faith and move this along."
Kassebaum Baker, now the wife of U.S. Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker, recently wrote Veneman that as a private citizen and Kansas cattle rancher she believed USDA had erred when it decided not to allow Creekstone, an Arkansas City, Kan., beef processor, to test 100% of its animals.
Senior field editor Larry Dreiling may be contacted by telephone at (785) 628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com
Date: 4/28/04
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