030637 USDA Plans Livestock Tracking System

Washington - Cattle, sheep and other livestock would be tagged at birth under a planned network that could help contain a mad cow scare.

The government officials and farm groups developing the network have not decided what markings to use and are not certain whether they want to make them a universal requirement, Chuck Lambert, the deputy undersecretary for Agriculture Department marketing programs, said Thursday.

The United States does not have a system for tracking most animals, a gap underscored last month when U.S. and Canadian officials spent days tracking down animals possibly linked to a case of mad cow disease in Canada.

Democrats in Congress argued that a tracking system could have sped up the investigation. Canada said the infection was an isolated case.

The identification system would be designed to improve food safety from farm to processor, Lambert told the House Agriculture Committee. He said the farm industry was working on a tracking system months before the case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was found in Canada.

Still, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association -- one of the groups developing the network -- cited the mad cow scare as one of several spurs.

"Now, with BSE and the resurgence of (bovine) tuberculosis, we need a system like this," said Chandler Keys, vice president of government affairs for the cattlemen.

The mad cow infection in Canada appears to have been limited to a single animal, but cases of bovine tuberculosis are more widespread. Cows sick with the damaging lung disease have been found in California, Michigan, New Mexico and Texas.

Keys compared tracking tags to supermarket barcodes. "Those IDs will follow those animals as long as they live."

Neil Hammerschmidt, a National Institute for Animal Agriculture official who is helping to design the network, predicted that microchips would replace tags within a few of years.

"The goal is to have traceback capabilities within 48 hours" of an outbreak, said Hammerschmidt, who also is the chief operating officer for Wisconsin Livestock Identification Consortium.

Pigs have been identified with tags or tattoos since 1988, said Jon Caspers, president of the National Pork Producers Council. Meatpackers can easily track down a market hog directly to its birth farm.

A panel of industry officials, state veterinarians and federal officials is scheduled to meet next week to discuss what the new tracing program will involve and whether the government would regulate it.

Congress is about to block funding for another program -- passed in last year's farm bill -- that would have required retailers, processors and farmers to keep careful records on livestock for labels that would identify for consumers where the processed animals were born, raised and slaughtered.

Grocers, packers and some farm groups persuaded lawmakers that the record keeping needed for the labels would have cost them billions of dollars and would have driven up food prices.

Some supporters of the labels claimed that they would have helped track animals linked to the sick cow in Canada.

Lambert, the deputy undersecretary said the planned tracking program would be more efficient than the labeling program.

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