October 6, 2006

 

Australia's NLIS mired in controversy

 

 

While national beef organisations are singing the praises of Australia's National Livestock Identification System (NLIS), some of the country's ranchers are fuming with the costs, inaccuracy and cumbersome procedures the system requires.

 

On top of that, MLA, the country's top beef marketing concern pushing for the NLIS, has been accused of skewing a newspaper's online poll gauging farmers' sentiments on the system, Australian television network ABC reported.   

 

Beef organisations such as the MLA say the NLIS was instituted to assure the quality and safety of Australian beef and to help Australian beef gain an edge in a competitive work market.

 

To be fair, some farmers have praised the speed and accuracy of using electronic tags as it meant less human error when recording details of the cattle.

 

However, other producers argue that the NLIS is costly to implement and the online database is being sloppily managed. Some farmers said only a fraction of the cattle they sold and recorded through the system has been recorded as having been killed at abattoirs.

 

Some are also incensed by the legislation in each State, which prohibits moving cattle from property to property or to sale yards without recording it on the database. Since most producers, agents and workers in abattoris are computer illiterate, only a small percentage of those cattle that are killed are recorded, resulting in chaos and unreliability.

 

Before the NLIS, most producers were using the cattle tail tagging system, a low-tech form of registering cattle which simply involved hand-written tags.

 

The Australian cattle industry owed much of that transition to MLA, who adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to win over producers.

 

It previously said the NLIS was required if producers hope to enter the EU and Japanese market. MLA had said the NLIS would bring greater trust in Australian beef in these markets, failing of which Australia would lose its marketing edge in an intensely competitive market.  

 

However, Japan has since clarified that there was no mandatory tracing requirement and the EU had said it was satisfied with the previous tail tagging system.

 

Still, MLA had insisted that the EU in 1999 had told them that Australia's system was no longer satisfactory and had threatened to end shipments unless it had a comprehensive tracking system similar to the EU's.

 

John Wyld, head of Meat and Livestock Australia's implementation scheme for the NLIS, said a lot of problems faced by producers would have been solved easily if they had simply phoned in for help with the computer.

 

To complicate matters, MLA was accused of rigging an online poll of a newspaper asking producers to rate the NLIS. Initially, 65 percent of voters had given it a poor or terrible rating but it swung to 70 percent of voters giving it a good or excellent rating in the end. Investigations by the newspaper later showed the poll had been hacked from an MLA office in Sydney.

 

It also did not help matters when it was revealed that Wyld's son owns a business which supplies software and tag readers.

 

The acrimony has prompted the Federal Government to order an audit into the performance of the database.

 

Australian agriculture minister Peter McGuaran is pleading with producers and the system's critics to be patient, as problems may arise due to the system's massive scope and the complexity of such new technology. However, he assured the industry that the system would only get better and is on its way to realising its full potential.