April 30, 2009

Fully implementing nationwide livestock identification and tracking programme would cost industry hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result of not implementing it could be far more expensive because meat exports would decline without it, according to a study released Wednesday (April 29) by the US Department of Agriculture.

The beef and dairy cattle industry would bear the majority of the cost, about US$209 million per year or about US$6 per head, to comply with the programme, according to the study completed by Kansas State University, Michigan State University and Montana State University.

But the cost of not fully implementing the programme would result in "significant losses - as great as US$13.2 billion annually due to reduced export market losses," according to a USDA synopsis of the study.

The study authors, according to the USDA, warned that "the international marketplace increasingly expects animal identification and tracing systems to be the norm for exporting countries and that the United States currently lags behind its major competitors."

The report itself, a 400-page document, says: "The United States could begin to lose access to international beef export markets if the United States falls behind world standards on adoption of an animal identification ... system."

But there is another reason to fear the absence of a national livestock identification programme, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday. It's effective in containing an animal disease outbreak.

And an effective programme ensures that foreign markets will react less severely to an outbreak of a disease such as the highly contagious livestock foot-and-mouth disease, or FMD.

During the first year of a hypothetical FMD outbreak, the US would lose 80 percent of its beef export market regardless of whether its livestock identification programme covered 90 percent or 30 percent of all cattle, according to the study. But the second year after an outbreak is where the big difference would be.

If the programme is just 30 percent effective, the US would still be losing 50 percent of its foreign beef market by the second year. If the programme were 90 percent effective, though, the loss of beef exports would be just 10 percent in the second year.

John Clifford, a deputy administrator at the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told lawmakers earlier this month that only 35 percent of US livestock producers are participating in what is now a voluntary programme and the situation is "not acceptable."

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

Vilsack said Wednesday he is still not prepared to decide on keeping a voluntary programme in place or ordering a switch to a mandatory programme.