National ID - Through Another Route?
09/02/2009 02:50PM
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Even though Congress voted earlier this year to stop funding the National Animal Identification System, there is some thinking within the livestock industry that identification could conceivably be implemented through other legislation. The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (HR 2749) is working its way through the legislative process. Among other things, the Act would charge the Secretary of Health and Human Services to require that “each person who produces, manufactures, processes, packs, transports, or holds a food” would have to “maintain the full pedigree of the origin and previous distribution history of the food, link that history with the distribution of the food, establish and maintain a system for tracing the food that is interoperable with the systems established and maintained by other such persons, and use a unique identifier for each facility owned or operated by such person for such purpose.”
There is no mention of precisely how identification of such traceback would be done or of how far traceback would extend. Note: this would deal with food safety (under FDA), not animal disease traceback (under USDA-NAIS). (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-2749)
Source: Dr. Stephen Hammack, Professor & Extension Beef Cattle Specialist Emeritus, Texas A&M University