Simpler to trace beef than pork from fork back to farm

ANALYSIS:The ability to track meat back to individual farms can make the difference between crisis and confidence, writes Ruadhan Mac Cormaic

CONTRAST THE understated official response to yesterdays confirmation that signs of contamination had been found in Irish cattle with the high drama of Saturday, when it was first revealed that pigs had been tainted with potentially dangerous dioxins.

Then, the test results led to the immediate recall of all native pork products and the abrupt suspension of a multimillion euro industry. Yesterday's news was deemed to require no more than an assurance that cattle on any farm found to have high dioxin levels would be slaughtered and their products withheld from market.

What's different this time?

First, the Government argues, the risk to public health - while extremely low in the case of affected pigmeat - is virtually non-existent when it comes to contaminated cattle. After tests on 11 farms, three showed the levels of the marker for substances called "non-dioxin-like PCBs" (polychlorinated biphenyls) were two to three times the proposed maximum legal levels. This compares to levels found in pork of 80 to 200 times the limit.

Another consideration is the State's ability to trace meat back to individual farms. Raising the question of whether authorities had reacted disproportionately by withdrawing all pork products when only 6-7 per cent of pig farms were implicated, Fine Gael MEP Avril Doyle said that if the concept of traceability were to have any practical meaning, the Government should have been able to isolate the problem and contain damage to the industry.

The tracing regime has been tightened considerably since the BSE scares, and in most cases it is relatively straightforward to track beef back from fork to farm. The authorities feel they can say with certainty that the cattle contamination will be contained once all animals with high dioxin levels are slaughtered and products from those herds are kept from market. As Irish Farmers Association (IFA) president Padraig Walshe put it yesterday: "We have the best traceability system in the world. The system has every animal on it right from birth through to slaughter. The farms are already isolated and it should be simple enough to isolate the meat if any of it has come from those farms."

Pigmeat is more complicated, however. Under the National Pig Identification Tracing System introduced in 2002, all the State's pigs are either indelibly tattooed or tagged so as to identify their herd. When pigs are sent to factory, the farmer is obliged to inform officials from South Western Services (SWS), a company based in Bandon, Co Cork, of the size, source and destination of the consignment.

Upon arrival at the processing plant, the factory owners are then required to inform SWS of the delivery details. "That's working very tightly. If I told them I was sending 60 pigs and the factory only recorded 59, they'd be back on to both of us straight away to know why there was a discrepancy," says Brendan Lynch, head of pig services at Teagasc.

The IFA says all fresh pork is therefore fully traceable, but the problem arises with other processed products such as sausages and pudding. These could be tracked back to their batches, but because meat from a number of different herds can be used in their production, the evidential sequence cannot necessarily lead all the way back to individual farms.

"In sausages and pudding, so many pieces of so many pigs are co-mingled, there's no way of tracing that back," Mr Lynch remarks. "You could trace it back to the day of manufacture but you couldn't trace it back to the individual farmer."

Of course all of this invites an obvious question about Saturdays recall decision. Why did the authorities not simply withdraw processed or untraceable products while leaving the higher-value fresh pork on the shelves here and abroad? The answer, it appears, lies with that nebulous if vital notion: consumer confidence.

To have left any products on the shelves with talk of dioxins and contamination circulating could have done fatal damage to the industry.

And to have issued a recall order for a selective list of some but not all products could have sown crippling confusion.

"I think the decision on Saturday was taken mainly in the interest of consumer confidence - to reassure consumers," said Mr Walshe.