Excuse me, please, while I rush in where angels fear to tread. Fools do that, the English poet Alexander Pope said, and I risk being counted a fool for voicing what I think about the now-defunct National Animal Identification System, which is that whatever replaces it will sooner or later end up looking a lot like it.
That view, I realize, will strike NAIS's many opponents as worse than foolishness -- closer to heresy. And while the opponents didn't burn anyone at the stake during the debate that led to NAIS's demise, their angry, boisterous nay saying in town meetings and internet chat rooms triumphed. A chagrined USDA was forced to scrap the proposal.
No doubt, NAIS wasn't perfect; few of man's conceptions are. The opponents had all sorts of complaints. NAIS would give the packers information they could use to drive down prices. It would just be a sop to purveyors of electronic ear tags, readers and software. It would ignore the real problem -- diseased imported cattle.
Many good people believed these things. I don't share their beliefs but I do sympathize with some of their privacy concerns and I also sympathize, in principle at least, with one additional grumble -- the costs producers would have had to bear. I say in principle because I think opponents exaggerated these costs. But I appreciate that small producers in particular may have had a legitimate gripe. I can't help but think, though, that if they'd approached the issue differently -- working to fix and improve on NAIS rather than to kill it -- they might have won reductions or subsidies.
Yet even if I gave more credence to the opponent's arguments, I would continue to fear opponents gave too little credence to the case for NAIS -- the critical role of traceability in limiting the damage from highly contagious animal diseases.
Because the U.S. has not had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease since 1929, some NAIS opponents assume we never will. We're different, they think, from Britain, Japan and South Korea, all of which have had outbreaks in the last decade. But are we?
To me, those who believe this are akin to the Wall Street bankers who thought the real-estate bubble would never burst. Like the bankers, they're assuming that because the first five chambers proved to be empty, the pistol isn't loaded.
If nothing else, they're ignoring the possibility of bio-terrorism.
Other NAIS opponents think state disease-tracing systems, to which USDA defaulted when it gave up on NAIS, will work as well as NAIS would have. USDA is spending the next several months in consultations aimed at coming up with a system that relies on the states but allows fast interstate traceability. Can such a system be devised? Color me skeptical.
When The Progressive Farmer queried Tom Ray, a veterinarian with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, he said "having 50 different systems will be a nightmare." He added that "throwing out a uniform electronic identification system is like throwing out your computers and going back to notebooks and pens."
The problem, in a word, is speed. In the wake of 9/11, the Pentagon did a war game to test what would happen if foot-and-mouth disease were introduced into the American herd. The results were frightening.
They showed that if the disease isn't traced back to the source and proper steps taken within 48 hours, it quickly spins out of control. In day one cattle in five states have been exposed. In less than a month nearly 50 million animals must be destroyed. Forty-eight hours is the difference between destroying millions of animals and tens of millions of animals.
In real life, of course, Congress would step in and provide disaster payments that covered some of cattle operators' losses. But in the years it would take to rebuild herds, export markets would be lost and dietary habits changed. Clearly it would be better to take steps to prevent the disaster in the first place.
NAIS is dead. The question now is what will take its place. Traceability is of benefit, first and foremost, to cattle producers. In the short run, USDA's new approach is probably the best we can hope for. All we can do now is take baby steps forward and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, while working on addressing producers' cost and privacy concerns.
But in the long run, a sluggish network of slow, potentially incompatible state systems won't serve producers' interests. At some point, we will have to get a system that provides 48-hour traceability. If that can be done with paper-based state systems, fine, but chances are it can't, which means the new system will eventually have to be electronic and nationwide.
Is it foolish to hope that we won't have to live through a disaster to make that final step?
**
As always I welcome your feedback on this letter and your suggestions for how DTN might serve you better.
Sincerely,
Urban
Urban C. Lehner Vice President, Editorial Office: 800-485-4000 / Direct:402 399 6440 Cell: 402 301 6143 / Fax: 402 390 7187 urban.lehner@telventdtn.com DTN/The Progressive Farmer - A Telvent Brand 9110 West Dodge Road Omaha, NE 68114
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