June 29, 2006

 

Beef group criticises planned audit of cattle tracking system

 

 

Australia's Minister of Agriculture Peter McGauran has been criticised for reversing his stand on the audit of the National Livestock Identification System (NLIS).

 

Australian Beef Association (ABA) chairwoman Linda Hewitt said McGauran broke his promise to do an "arms length" audit of NLIS.

 

 

Hewitt said she was shocked to read that McGauran's department would oversee the audit conducted within Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA).

 

Australia's NLIS system was the subject of an audit recently as a group charged that there were millions of "phantom cows" in the system- cows that do not really exist. Australia's minister of agriculture has promised to look into the matter. 

 

Hewitt said MLA, who oversees the system, is not entirely at fault since the technology behind the NLIS itself is itself faulty. EU officials had expressed their concerns about such a system as far back as six years ago, Hewitt said.

 

Any computer database is only as accurate as the data input systems, she continued. Hewitt said the errors resulted partially because many abattoirs are not recording the animals killed.

 

She said an audit in its present form would be quite meaningless, as it does not address the issues that ABA raised.

 

Hewitt said any audit should have these conditions.

 

- random selection of at least 30 producers in each state.

 

- analysis of each sale consignment dispatched by each of the above over the past year with producer's sales compared with what is recorded on the database and the differences recorded.

 

- analysis of the traceability trail of each of the cattle sold - where the trail ended-- property, saleyard, feedlot, abattoir, butcher/supermarket, or export country/company.

 

Only with these conditions would Australia would know the kind of result NLIS yields, Hewitt said.