Washington, D.C. - If anything was obvious after the discovery of the nation's first-ever case of mad cow disease, it was this: The United States needs a way to track cattle from birth to slaughter.
Federal investigators spent more than a month trying to locate the 81 cattle that were in the same original herd as the infected cow and only found 29.
President Bush's administration pledged to accelerate work on a national animal identification system, an idea that consumer advocates had been pushing for years. The first ID numbers could be issued to farms this fall.
But now the Sierra Club and a coalition of farm groups are raising a lot of concerns about the creation of a high-tech national ID system.
In a letter to members of Congress and Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, the groups say the U.S. Department of Agriculture should stick to expanding state ID programs - like the old-fashioned branding systems still used in states like Texas.
Creating a new system would take a lot more time than expanding existing programs and would "pose a major expense for taxpayers, family farmers and ranchers," the groups say.
They also worry that meatpackers - or lawyers for food-poisoning victims - will get their hands on identification information to track problem livestock back to the farm or ranch.
"This information has to be used responsibly by government officials," said George Naylor, an Iowa farmer who is president of the National Family Farm Coalition. "Otherwise you could have a producer being dragged into court on all kinds of things that aren't based on anything solid."
Along with Naylor's group, the coalition includes some independent organizations of cattle producers that are growing in influence, including R-CALF USA and the Organization for Competitive Markets.
What these groups have in common is a distrust of meatpackers and large-scale farms.
The groups have good reason to worry about the cost.
Estimates are that a national ID system could cost as much as $550 million. The government is likely to pick up about a third of the cost, says the USDA's chief economist, Keith Collins.
If you increase costs of doing business, you make it harder for the least efficient companies - or in this case, farms - to keep going. That's true with taxes or environmental regulations and also for the animal-welfare standards being forced on farms.
"Why not let the packer pay for it?" asks Naylor. "They can decide whether they are going to put the price to the consumer or back to the producer."
By suggesting that the government stick with using existing ID systems, these groups are behind the times.
Farmers have kept the idea of a national ID system bottled up for years - mainly out of concern that they will be targeted with lawsuits after outbreaks of food poisoning.
At the insistence of farm groups, a provision in the 2002 farm bill that required meat to be labeled with the country-of-origin specifically barred the USDA from setting up an ID program to enforce the labeling law.
But the mad cow case has made it inevitable that the federal government is going to set up an ID program. Consumer groups will not stand for anything else.
Why would the Sierra Club raise concerns about a livestock ID program? That's a good question.
source: http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040425/BUSINESS03/404250333/1030/BUSINESS01 26apr04
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