The proceedings of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture’s (NIAA) 2006 ID INFO EXPO are now available online on the organization’s website.
The Expo provided an opportunity for each of the individual species working groups to give an update on their planning to develop an animal identification system that meets the goals of the USDA’s National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Representatives from the USDA, including Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, also offered comments on the department’s current thinking regarding implementation of the premises registration and the animal identification portions of the NAIS.
The USDA is developing a plan by which animal health officials could access various databases maintained by individual states or private entities containing the data necessary for the department to track animal movements associated with foreign animal disease outbreaks or program diseases.
The swine industry is proposing to adapt the existing identification requirements in place since 1988 to comply with the goals set forth in the NAIS and producers are actively participating in premises registration. Swine producers have called for a mandatory program that includes all pertinent livestock species designed in such a way as to capture the information required by the NAIS but does not add additional costs to producers. To achieve this goal, swine producers have submitted a plan that would encourage premises registration and animal or group/lot identification in compliance with the needs of the NAIS. Under the proposed plan, animal tracking would occur as part of a normal business practice with all animal movements recorded but only those movements currently required to be reported (i.e. those movements requiring certificates of veterinary inspection or interstate movement records) would continue to be reported.
There continues to be much debate about who controls access to the data, who pays the costs of collecting, maintaining and reporting the data, and the ability to maintain confidentiality of the data.