Part II: Report on IDTechEx Food Traceability 2006
2006120
Norm Cheesman described his Can-Trace, Canada, bringing the food sectors and the whole chain together to build traceability standards. There is a great challenge of managing multiple stakeholders in an essentially voluntary initiative
Cristian Barcan, Project Manager - Traceability and Food Safety of BASF Germany spoke of how his company is the world's largest chemical company now and it gets into a lot of "pull through" marketing and facilitation for its products. BASF feels that whole-chain traceability is the future. For example, the TELOP-TRACE project in farmed salmon is first electronic whole-chain traceable market segment. BASF is implementing TraceTracker as a solution for whole-chain traceability.
"The Brazilian Official Livestock Certification System as an Issue for Cattle Traceability and the Situation Concerning Food Traceability" was covered by Valeria Homem, Federal Fiscal, Ministry of Agriculture, Brazil. Brazil has the largest number of cattle livestock in the world - over 200 million.
She described the ground-breaking Brazilian System of Bovine and Bubaline Identification and Origin Certification, the official system envisioned in 2001 by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and the very good experience and results to date.
Precedents for this work included
- Spread of contagious diseases related to increased animal movements and trading relations - trace capacity - traceability
- BSE: continuing problems
first diagnostic in the world in 1986 in Great Britain:
feeding implications (feedstuffs containing meat-and-bone meal or greaves of ruminant origin potentially contaminated with a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy - TSE)
Imported animal controls
Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease is related to BSE in 1996 in Great Britain
- FMD: danger of spreading disease
- Illegal chemical and biological residues and contamination
- Dioxin
- Hormones
- Prohibited Medication
The IDTechEx conference Food Traceability 2006, held on February 1-2 2006 in Dallas, USA, was a great success with attendance from 13 countries. There was a consensus that track, trace and identify are merging as both sciences and needs. Requirements and executions before and after the farm gate are also becoming seamless. These barriers are rapidly breaking down. New sources of data such as RFID, 2D barcodes and widespread DNA analysis are creating a challenge in the sheer volume of data generated. www.trackingfood.com 
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