March 12, 2009

The US government is spending millions of dollars to try to get livestock producers to participate in an animal tracking programme, but so far it's been a failure, a USDA official told lawmakers Wednesday (Mar 11).

 

John Clifford, a deputy administrator at the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), told the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry, that only 35 percent of US livestock producers are participating in what is now a voluntary programme.

 

"This system, currently as it is...is not effective," Clifford said.

 

But it needs to be effective for the government to protect US livestock from highly infective diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, or FMD.

 

The goal is to be able to track a disease outbreak to its source in 48 hours, Clifford said. So far the USDA has spent US$119 million, but it's still nowhere near reaching that goal.

 

Recently it took an average of 199 days to trace back the origin of 27 cattle in a bovine tuberculosis investigation, Clifford said. Canada, on the other hand, has a mandatory programme and it took that government 19 days to perform a similar traceback.

 

"This is simply not acceptable," Clifford said.

 

And that kind of delays the US has in tracking cattle with tuberculosis would be disastrous if FMD were ever re-introduced into the US, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said during the hearing.

 

Peterson, who has often said he believes a mandatory livestock identification system is needed, chided others for quibbling over concerns such as the cost and fears of trusting the USDA with business information.

 

Beef cattle are the biggest obstacle in a completing a nationwide animal identification program, according to Clifford, because, unlike pigs and chickens, each animal has to be individually tagged and recorded.

 

And the cost to the government of overseeing a national programme would range between US$160 million to US$190 million per year, Clifford said.

 

The cost of implementing and maintaining the identification-and-tracking programme would be nothing compared to the cost of not having it in place during an FMD outbreak, Peterson said.

 

In a recent briefing by the US Department of Homeland Security, Peterson said he was told that FMD could cause US$30 billion to US$100 billion worth of damage to the cattle industry - essentially crippling production.

 

"You can get all hung up about (information confidentiality) and all this other stuff and drag your damn feet, but what you're doing is putting yourself at risk," Peterson said.

 

The Department of Homeland Security has been studying the possibility of a new FMD outbreak in the US, unintentionally or as a terrorist act, for years. FMD is not believed to pose any health risks to humans, but DHS officials have said they consider the disease a threat to the US economy.

 

USDA's Clifford would not say directly that a mandatory programme should be the way to go. That, he said, is something USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack needs to decide.

 

But after insistent prodding from lawmakers on the subcommittee, Clifford did relent and offer an opinion: "The system we have thus far is not working. Unless we can provide adequate incentives under a voluntary system, it's got to be mandatory."

 

The Bush administration originally intended to put in place an animal-identification system that was at first voluntary and slowly transitioned into mandatory, but that changed in August 2006 when the administration bowed to pressure from industry groups that insisted it never be mandatory.

 

But regardless of whether the programme remains voluntary or becomes mandatory, big changes are needed, Clifford said, and it will take three to four years to do that.