Secretary Johanns Conducts Briefing on NAIS

August 31, 2005 — 

US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns conducted a technical briefing to update the media on the National Animal ID System (NAIS) on Tuesday August 30th. During this briefing, Sec. Johanns described the current principles guiding USDA's direction regarding the NAIS. He acknowledged that "there are differing views on some pretty fundamental questions like whether data in the system should be publicly or privately held, how can we protect confidentiality of the data, and whether the data collection should be a voluntary system or a mandatory system." He indicated that "animal movement data should be maintained in a private system that can be readily accessed when necessary by state and federal animal health authorities" which would ultimately be populated with data from the individual species-specific record-keeping systems.

USDA plans to hold a stakeholder meeting in the fall to "further define the private tracking system and discuss user requirements in system specifications." The department will continue to move forward with on-going premise registration efforts and work with stakeholders to design the animal tracking portion of the NAIS. "It simply makes good sense for producers to design and to maintain that piece of the system," remarked Sec. Johanns.

He also reminded participants that USDA had invested $52 million in this project through FY05 and the President's FY06 budget requests an additional $33 million. This money has been spent on infrastructure development and cooperative agreements with states and tribes.

According to a press release on their website, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) largely supports the Secretary's comments regarding the need to move forward with development and implementation of species-specific ID systems. ?The swine industry will use the existing mandatory Pseudorabies Eradication program standards as the model for a national swine identification system,? NPPC President-Elect Joy Philippi said. ?This will ensure that the swine industry is able to build on a proven and effective program that has been developed, implemented and accepted by pork producers, and federal and state partners and one in which costs have already been built into the pork production system.?

Source:

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2005/08/0339.xml

http://www.nppc.org/wm/show.php?id=483&c=1