Bucky
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Twisting Trail
U.S. Falls Behind
In Tracking Cattle
To Control Disease
USDA Plans Voluntary System
After the Industry Divides
On Making One Mandatory
A Mad Cow's Unknown Origins
By STEVE STECKLOW
June 21, 2006; Page A1
When the first U.S. case of mad-cow disease was discovered in December 2003, then-Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman pledged to hasten creation of a national identification system for tracing livestock quickly during a disease outbreak. She said she asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief information officer "to make it his top priority."
Today, more than two years later, the U.S. still has no national ID system for most farm animals, including chickens and beef cattle.
[cowid]
The USDA, which has been discussing a system for nearly a decade -- and has spent $84.7 million to develop it -- now says one will begin operating next year. Although the agency expects nearly all newborn farm animals to be included in the system by 2009, it has abandoned the idea of mandatory participation, leaving critics to cast doubt on that projection.
As recently as April 2005, the USDA's draft plan for a national ID system called for mandatory participation. But USDA officials insist the agency was never committed to that idea, and that in response to industry feedback they decided to go with a voluntary system. They express confidence that market forces, including pressure from big beef buyers and export markets, will help drive cattle owners to register their animals.
"I believe the industry as a whole does understand and believe that a system is needed and they will participate," says John R. Clifford, the USDA's chief veterinary officer. He says the agency will review making the system mandatory if participation isn't adequate.
An ID system would assign each animal a unique number, and record all its movements as it travels to new ranches, farms or other destinations. This tracking information could prove critical in controlling outbreaks of contagious diseases because it would allow investigators to quickly locate animals that were exposed to ones already known to be infected. The USDA's goal is to be able to trace animals within 48 hours.
But the ID issue has become mired in controversy, with livestock raisers' trade groups pitted against each other and a fast-growing grassroots movement that opposes any tracking system. Many ranchers, meanwhile, worry that animal-rights groups will get hold of the data if the government runs the system. But after considering one type of privatized tracking system, the USDA changed course when a chorus of opposition arose, including complaints from some cattlemen that such a database might be used to manipulate beef prices. Now the agency envisions a voluntary system with multiple private databases.
A number of animal-health experts and several former USDA officials scoff at a voluntary system. They believe many ranchers and farmers, particularly those fearing legal liability if their animals are found to be diseased, will participate only if the system is mandatory. They also warn that a voluntary system will be inadequate for containing potentially devastating diseases like foot-and-mouth that are far more contagious than mad cow.
"If it isn't mandatory, it simply will not work," says Bobby R. Acord, who until April 2004 ran the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "There are not enough market forces to make it happen." Mr. Acord is now a consultant to the National Pork Producers Council, which favors a mandatory system. There is already one in place for swine in interstate commerce, and the group says it works.
One current economic incentive hasn't convinced many beef sellers that a tracking system pays. McDonald's Corp. offers several cents per pound extra to U.S. producers who can provide information that allows the chain to trace the origin of its beef products. But the company, which supports a mandatory tracking system, has been disappointed with the number of producers taking its offer, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The lack of a national tracking system may already be hurting U.S. beef exports, which suffered after the discovery here of mad cow. Japan, South Korea and China still don't allow U.S. beef -- a ban that has cost domestic producers more than $5 billion in exports over the past two-and-a-half years, according to industry estimates.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently told a meeting of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association that beef exporters like Australia are "aggressively marketing traceability to gain an advantage," according to the group's newspaper. "Competitors are out there saying, 'We've got I.D. They don't.'"
In recent years, about 40 countries -- including Canada, Britain, Japan and lesser-developed nations like Namibia and Botswana -- have implemented some form of mandatory, national animal-tracking systems covering cattle.
Smaller-scale USDA and state animal ID programs already have helped combat specific diseases. But they're sometimes in place only until the health risk ebbs. In the 1990s, an ID system for cattle played a key role in stemming a disease in domestic herds called brucellosis, which can also spread to humans and cause severe fever, weight loss and other debilitating symptoms. With the disease rate now low, most ranchers are no longer required to tag their animals.
With mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, tracking is crucial because the illness is known to spread from cow to cow via contaminated feed. Lacking an effective way to trace cattle, the USDA failed to locate all of the potentially infected cattle linked to the 2003 mad-cow case and two subsequent ones in the U.S.
In the most recent incident -- a red beef cow in Alabama that tested positive in March -- officials, using DNA tests, investigated 36 different farms and five auction houses to try to figure out where it was born and what happened to its herd-mates. They couldn't.
A herd-mate from this animal "could be entering a slaughterhouse tomorrow and we would never know because they don't have that tracking system in place," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer group. Scientists generally agree that humans can contract the fatal, brain-wasting disorder by eating meat from infected animals. World-wide, more than 150 people have died from the human form of mad-cow, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, although none of the deaths has been linked to U.S. beef.
Bitter Feuding
A number of past participants in USDA animal-ID planning blame some of the delay in establishing a system on bitter feuding within the livestock industry. Trade associations have argued over who will control the data -- the government or private organizations -- as well as what information will be collected, who can access it and who will pay for the system.
A main concern has been confidentiality. The industry wants to make sure that animal-rights activists can't use the federal Freedom of Information Act to learn the locations of livestock operations, which might make it easier for them to stage protests.
A vocal grassroots movement of small farmers and ranchers who oppose an animal-tracking system has been lobbying state and federal officials, rallying support through the Internet. One Web site, StopAnimalID.org, warns that under the USDA plan animal owners would be subject "to constant federal and state government surveillance," a claim the agency denies.
Walter Jeffries, a pig farmer in West Topsham, Vt., runs another opposition site, NoNAIS.org, that he says draws between 7,000 and 13,000 visitors every weekday.
Registration of premises where animals are kept, a first step in a national tracking program, has already begun. But in a number of states, animal ID opponents have been trying to undermine the process. In February, dozens of protesters at a meeting of the Texas Animal Health Commission helped persuade it to postpone implementing regulations that would require such registration.
"This is supposed to be the land of the free, and pretty soon we'll be able to do nothing on our own property without permission from the government," says Ken Kerner, a 47-year-old farmer and auto-body-shop owner from Cedar Creek, Texas, who owns a dozen cows.
Beginning with the branding of cattle more than a century ago, livestock identification in the U.S. has a long history. What's evolved is an ad hoc group of systems, for particular species or in geographic regions. But they aren't linked. "The problem with all those systems is they don't communicate with each other," says Valerie E. Ragan, a former assistant deputy administrator for veterinary services at the USDA. "There's no standardization."
[meat market]
In 1998 the Holstein Association, a group of dairy-cattle breeders, launched a voluntary "National Farm Animal Identification & Records System" program to try to change that. Partly funded by the USDA as a pilot program, it has registered nearly three million animals in 48 states. Still, it doesn't extend much beyond the dairy industry.
Following a foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain in 2001 that led to the killing of millions of pigs, cattle and sheep, the National Institute for Animal Agriculture, a nonprofit group, set up a U.S. task force with both industry and USDA representatives to kick-start a national animal ID system.
After the U.S.'s first mad-cow case was discovered, the USDA used an NIAA draft plan as a basis for creating a national system that could trace farm animals in a disease outbreak within 48 hours. The NIAA plan envisioned a system by 2006.
By 2003, says Glenn N. Slack, the NIAA's former chief executive, there was a general consensus within the livestock industry that the USDA would oversee the system and would control the data. "Most everyone was on the same page," he says.
But the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which doesn't belong to the NIAA, began on its own to develop a voluntary, industry-run database for tracking animals. The NCBA represents thousands of cattle ranchers and feedlot operators, as well as meat packers, retailers and restaurants.
"We would prefer that to a government-managed program because we think a private database, first of all, is going to protect producer confidentiality to a much greater degree," says Joe Schuele, a NCBA spokesman. Cattlemen, he says, consider the names of their clients and the size of their herds to be proprietary information. They don't want competitors, or buyers, to have access to such details.
The NIAA's Mr. Slack says the "spirit of cooperation" within the industry "started to unravel" when the NCBA began pursuing its own plan in 2004. Another producers' trade association, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, or R-Calf, which favors a government-run system, says it didn't trust the NCBA.
The group fears that meat packers who belong to the NCBA might take advantage of the information in the private database -- for example, offering less if the data suggested cattle were in large supply. "It would give them tremendous buying power in the marketplace," says Bill Bullard, R-Calf's chief executive.
The NCBA denies meat packers would have access to the database and dismisses R-Calf's concerns. "They don't like anything we like," says Jay Truitt, the NCBA's vice president for government affairs in Washington.
Another issue is information oversight. Several past participants in the USDA's national animal ID planning program say they always assumed the government would administer the database. But in August, the USDA said it would support a tracking system in which animal-movement data was sent to "a single, privately held animal-tracking repository" that it could access -- the kind of plan the NCBA was advocating.
Allen Bright, the NCBA's animal ID coordinator, says his group believed the database the NCBA was developing would work well and draw industry support, and so "anticipated" that the USDA would choose it as the privately held repository.
Dale Moore, the USDA's chief of staff and a former NCBA chief lobbyist, says the policy change was based on input from more than just the NCBA. Producer groups and some state officials, he says, "felt a private-database approach would get us to our goals more quickly."
'An Uproar'
But Mr. Moore concedes the privatization plan created "an uproar," with many industry groups opposed to a single database and some groups demanding their own. By January, USDA officials were suggesting that the agency would abandon the idea. In April, it formally announced a "metadata system" that would allow the government to access animal movement tracking information from multiple, private, voluntary databases run by various industry groups.
The NCBA is still hoping to play a major role. In January, it helped to launch a nonprofit called the U.S. Animal Identification Organization to create a giant, multispecies private database with animal-tracking information. The NCBA, which has a representative on the nonprofit's board, now says it expects the database to be one of several eventually authorized by the USDA.
Last month, a House appropriations subcommittee voted to withhold nearly all additional funding for a national animal ID system until the USDA better defines the program and its costs. And yesterday, a Senate appropriations subcommittee voted unanimously to ask the Government Accountability Office to review the ID program's progress because "the direction of this system remains unclear." Terri Teuber, the USDA's director of communications, says the agency is confident it can satisfy those queries.
Write to Steve Stecklow at [email protected]
U.S. Falls Behind
In Tracking Cattle
To Control Disease
USDA Plans Voluntary System
After the Industry Divides
On Making One Mandatory
A Mad Cow's Unknown Origins
By STEVE STECKLOW
June 21, 2006; Page A1
When the first U.S. case of mad-cow disease was discovered in December 2003, then-Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman pledged to hasten creation of a national identification system for tracing livestock quickly during a disease outbreak. She said she asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief information officer "to make it his top priority."
Today, more than two years later, the U.S. still has no national ID system for most farm animals, including chickens and beef cattle.
[cowid]
The USDA, which has been discussing a system for nearly a decade -- and has spent $84.7 million to develop it -- now says one will begin operating next year. Although the agency expects nearly all newborn farm animals to be included in the system by 2009, it has abandoned the idea of mandatory participation, leaving critics to cast doubt on that projection.
As recently as April 2005, the USDA's draft plan for a national ID system called for mandatory participation. But USDA officials insist the agency was never committed to that idea, and that in response to industry feedback they decided to go with a voluntary system. They express confidence that market forces, including pressure from big beef buyers and export markets, will help drive cattle owners to register their animals.
"I believe the industry as a whole does understand and believe that a system is needed and they will participate," says John R. Clifford, the USDA's chief veterinary officer. He says the agency will review making the system mandatory if participation isn't adequate.
An ID system would assign each animal a unique number, and record all its movements as it travels to new ranches, farms or other destinations. This tracking information could prove critical in controlling outbreaks of contagious diseases because it would allow investigators to quickly locate animals that were exposed to ones already known to be infected. The USDA's goal is to be able to trace animals within 48 hours.
But the ID issue has become mired in controversy, with livestock raisers' trade groups pitted against each other and a fast-growing grassroots movement that opposes any tracking system. Many ranchers, meanwhile, worry that animal-rights groups will get hold of the data if the government runs the system. But after considering one type of privatized tracking system, the USDA changed course when a chorus of opposition arose, including complaints from some cattlemen that such a database might be used to manipulate beef prices. Now the agency envisions a voluntary system with multiple private databases.
A number of animal-health experts and several former USDA officials scoff at a voluntary system. They believe many ranchers and farmers, particularly those fearing legal liability if their animals are found to be diseased, will participate only if the system is mandatory. They also warn that a voluntary system will be inadequate for containing potentially devastating diseases like foot-and-mouth that are far more contagious than mad cow.
"If it isn't mandatory, it simply will not work," says Bobby R. Acord, who until April 2004 ran the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "There are not enough market forces to make it happen." Mr. Acord is now a consultant to the National Pork Producers Council, which favors a mandatory system. There is already one in place for swine in interstate commerce, and the group says it works.
One current economic incentive hasn't convinced many beef sellers that a tracking system pays. McDonald's Corp. offers several cents per pound extra to U.S. producers who can provide information that allows the chain to trace the origin of its beef products. But the company, which supports a mandatory tracking system, has been disappointed with the number of producers taking its offer, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The lack of a national tracking system may already be hurting U.S. beef exports, which suffered after the discovery here of mad cow. Japan, South Korea and China still don't allow U.S. beef -- a ban that has cost domestic producers more than $5 billion in exports over the past two-and-a-half years, according to industry estimates.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently told a meeting of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association that beef exporters like Australia are "aggressively marketing traceability to gain an advantage," according to the group's newspaper. "Competitors are out there saying, 'We've got I.D. They don't.'"
In recent years, about 40 countries -- including Canada, Britain, Japan and lesser-developed nations like Namibia and Botswana -- have implemented some form of mandatory, national animal-tracking systems covering cattle.
Smaller-scale USDA and state animal ID programs already have helped combat specific diseases. But they're sometimes in place only until the health risk ebbs. In the 1990s, an ID system for cattle played a key role in stemming a disease in domestic herds called brucellosis, which can also spread to humans and cause severe fever, weight loss and other debilitating symptoms. With the disease rate now low, most ranchers are no longer required to tag their animals.
With mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, tracking is crucial because the illness is known to spread from cow to cow via contaminated feed. Lacking an effective way to trace cattle, the USDA failed to locate all of the potentially infected cattle linked to the 2003 mad-cow case and two subsequent ones in the U.S.
In the most recent incident -- a red beef cow in Alabama that tested positive in March -- officials, using DNA tests, investigated 36 different farms and five auction houses to try to figure out where it was born and what happened to its herd-mates. They couldn't.
A herd-mate from this animal "could be entering a slaughterhouse tomorrow and we would never know because they don't have that tracking system in place," says Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer group. Scientists generally agree that humans can contract the fatal, brain-wasting disorder by eating meat from infected animals. World-wide, more than 150 people have died from the human form of mad-cow, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, although none of the deaths has been linked to U.S. beef.
Bitter Feuding
A number of past participants in USDA animal-ID planning blame some of the delay in establishing a system on bitter feuding within the livestock industry. Trade associations have argued over who will control the data -- the government or private organizations -- as well as what information will be collected, who can access it and who will pay for the system.
A main concern has been confidentiality. The industry wants to make sure that animal-rights activists can't use the federal Freedom of Information Act to learn the locations of livestock operations, which might make it easier for them to stage protests.
A vocal grassroots movement of small farmers and ranchers who oppose an animal-tracking system has been lobbying state and federal officials, rallying support through the Internet. One Web site, StopAnimalID.org, warns that under the USDA plan animal owners would be subject "to constant federal and state government surveillance," a claim the agency denies.
Walter Jeffries, a pig farmer in West Topsham, Vt., runs another opposition site, NoNAIS.org, that he says draws between 7,000 and 13,000 visitors every weekday.
Registration of premises where animals are kept, a first step in a national tracking program, has already begun. But in a number of states, animal ID opponents have been trying to undermine the process. In February, dozens of protesters at a meeting of the Texas Animal Health Commission helped persuade it to postpone implementing regulations that would require such registration.
"This is supposed to be the land of the free, and pretty soon we'll be able to do nothing on our own property without permission from the government," says Ken Kerner, a 47-year-old farmer and auto-body-shop owner from Cedar Creek, Texas, who owns a dozen cows.
Beginning with the branding of cattle more than a century ago, livestock identification in the U.S. has a long history. What's evolved is an ad hoc group of systems, for particular species or in geographic regions. But they aren't linked. "The problem with all those systems is they don't communicate with each other," says Valerie E. Ragan, a former assistant deputy administrator for veterinary services at the USDA. "There's no standardization."
[meat market]
In 1998 the Holstein Association, a group of dairy-cattle breeders, launched a voluntary "National Farm Animal Identification & Records System" program to try to change that. Partly funded by the USDA as a pilot program, it has registered nearly three million animals in 48 states. Still, it doesn't extend much beyond the dairy industry.
Following a foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain in 2001 that led to the killing of millions of pigs, cattle and sheep, the National Institute for Animal Agriculture, a nonprofit group, set up a U.S. task force with both industry and USDA representatives to kick-start a national animal ID system.
After the U.S.'s first mad-cow case was discovered, the USDA used an NIAA draft plan as a basis for creating a national system that could trace farm animals in a disease outbreak within 48 hours. The NIAA plan envisioned a system by 2006.
By 2003, says Glenn N. Slack, the NIAA's former chief executive, there was a general consensus within the livestock industry that the USDA would oversee the system and would control the data. "Most everyone was on the same page," he says.
But the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which doesn't belong to the NIAA, began on its own to develop a voluntary, industry-run database for tracking animals. The NCBA represents thousands of cattle ranchers and feedlot operators, as well as meat packers, retailers and restaurants.
"We would prefer that to a government-managed program because we think a private database, first of all, is going to protect producer confidentiality to a much greater degree," says Joe Schuele, a NCBA spokesman. Cattlemen, he says, consider the names of their clients and the size of their herds to be proprietary information. They don't want competitors, or buyers, to have access to such details.
The NIAA's Mr. Slack says the "spirit of cooperation" within the industry "started to unravel" when the NCBA began pursuing its own plan in 2004. Another producers' trade association, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, or R-Calf, which favors a government-run system, says it didn't trust the NCBA.
The group fears that meat packers who belong to the NCBA might take advantage of the information in the private database -- for example, offering less if the data suggested cattle were in large supply. "It would give them tremendous buying power in the marketplace," says Bill Bullard, R-Calf's chief executive.
The NCBA denies meat packers would have access to the database and dismisses R-Calf's concerns. "They don't like anything we like," says Jay Truitt, the NCBA's vice president for government affairs in Washington.
Another issue is information oversight. Several past participants in the USDA's national animal ID planning program say they always assumed the government would administer the database. But in August, the USDA said it would support a tracking system in which animal-movement data was sent to "a single, privately held animal-tracking repository" that it could access -- the kind of plan the NCBA was advocating.
Allen Bright, the NCBA's animal ID coordinator, says his group believed the database the NCBA was developing would work well and draw industry support, and so "anticipated" that the USDA would choose it as the privately held repository.
Dale Moore, the USDA's chief of staff and a former NCBA chief lobbyist, says the policy change was based on input from more than just the NCBA. Producer groups and some state officials, he says, "felt a private-database approach would get us to our goals more quickly."
'An Uproar'
But Mr. Moore concedes the privatization plan created "an uproar," with many industry groups opposed to a single database and some groups demanding their own. By January, USDA officials were suggesting that the agency would abandon the idea. In April, it formally announced a "metadata system" that would allow the government to access animal movement tracking information from multiple, private, voluntary databases run by various industry groups.
The NCBA is still hoping to play a major role. In January, it helped to launch a nonprofit called the U.S. Animal Identification Organization to create a giant, multispecies private database with animal-tracking information. The NCBA, which has a representative on the nonprofit's board, now says it expects the database to be one of several eventually authorized by the USDA.
Last month, a House appropriations subcommittee voted to withhold nearly all additional funding for a national animal ID system until the USDA better defines the program and its costs. And yesterday, a Senate appropriations subcommittee voted unanimously to ask the Government Accountability Office to review the ID program's progress because "the direction of this system remains unclear." Terri Teuber, the USDA's director of communications, says the agency is confident it can satisfy those queries.
Write to Steve Stecklow at [email protected]
