Cattle lifecycle, traceability and supply chain - Case Study

What are the Current Issues with Cattle Produce

It is very difficult to ensure that meat produce entering the supply chain is of maximum grade and also even where the meat originated. In Canada, cheap meat is being imported but processed locally, providing the importers the ability to label the meat as local. The UK has seen this too with different produce including pork, whereby Danish pork is labelled as British due to the production process taking place within the UK.

There are also concerns as to the farming method used to produce meat, including over use of antibiotics and even enhancers, such as hormone implants.

Worldwide it is estimated that 73% of all antibiotics are used in farm animals, not people. Much of this use is routine, and enables farm animals, most often pigs and poultry but sometimes also cattle, to be kept in poor conditions where disease spreads easily.

Which Countries use hormone implants?

Hormones implants have been used in the US for over fifty years and are now approved in about 30 countries, including Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico and most of South America with the exception of Brazil. But that doesn’t mean that hormone implants are given to all cattle produced in these countries. In the US about two thirds of cattle are given hormone implants. Countries require strict monitoring of which cattle have been implanted with hormones and which have not.

Disparate Information Systems

As with most sectors, there are information service providers competing for a stake in the market. This is true with agriculture and makes for interoperability problems. Even with the push into agriculture from large players, such and SAP and Oracle, there is still the well known inability to efficiently exchange data in an open connectivity manner.

Brexit Movement of Goods Impact

In order to qualify for tariff-free access, GB goods will need to meet RoO requirements. Some industries, especially food, will simply be unable to do this: cane sugar imported from the Caribbean and refined in the UK will not qualify for access to the EU tariff-free, nor will basmati rice imported from India and milled in the UK. Any meat product must contain only meat from animals born and raised in the UK or the EU.

Imports will still need to comply with the respective UK and EU laws in this area. Sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) border controls involve the most extensive checks, with specialist paperwork and frequent physical inspections required on products of animal origin. This UK–EU deal sets a general aim to keeping the frequency of checks to a minimum but does not remove the need for them. The UK has not achieved its ambition of agreeing an equivalence mechanism for SPS measures, or agreeing a reduced level of checks or fees similar to the EU–New Zealand veterinary agreement where only 1% of goods are subject to SPS checks. This would likely have required the UK to sign up to greater regulatory alignment with the EU in this area. 

From the quotes above, extracted from https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/future-relationship-trade-deal/goods it is easy to see the firm requirements and extra checks required within the entire supply chain of meats both imported from the EU and exported from the UK. This will place more burden on the supply chain as a whole and in particular the farmers and customs during the export and import procedures. Currently the burden will present a great deal of extra paperwork and more weight on the various separate systems in use through the whole sector.

Traceability of Breeds

Farmers are required to keep records of all medications, veterinary and to an extent, contact between animals on their farms. However, being able to drill deeper into the family history, overall farm conditions and associative contact is extremely difficult. During production, it is almost impossible to ascertain the cut of meat back to the cattle it was produced from. Much of the paperwork is completed for export, based again on disparate systems and knowledge, thus does not provide a truly transparent view of the meat.

Consumer Knowledge

The end user or consumer is the ultimate person to be protected and be provided with true and fit information in order for them to be able to make a calculated decision on the cut of meat at purchase time. As with many products, “fudging” of information is used in an attempt to “trick” the consumer into purchasing meat which is not necessarily the cut they believe they are purchasing.