Brussels, 06/05/2003 (Agence Europe) - On a farm at Monterotondo, near Rome, on Monday, the European Commission presented the results of the IDEA (identification électronique des animaux) project, which confirms the feasibility of electronic tagging for cows, sheep and goats. The traditional systems, such as tattooing or ear-tagging, can be modified and are not always reliable, which can make them ineffective. The manual recording of data is slow and is open to errors. The Commission has already proposed a regulation on the identification and registration of sheep and goats.
The IDEA was a large-scale project which ran from March 1998 to December 2001. A million animals were electronically tagged in six EU countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. The feasibility of various tagging systems applied to ruminants (cattle, buffalo, sheep and goats) was examined, and the structure needed to implement them defined. In order to compare the performances of the most promising solutions, electronic tags, boluses (ceramic capsules kept in the reticulum or second fore-stomach of the animal), or injectable transponders were fitted on 390,000 cattle, 500,000 sheep and 29,000 goats. The way the various systems worked was checked after one day, one month and then one year, during movement phases, at slaughter and once the hardware was recovered. The IDEA project clearly demonstrates that considerable improvements can be made to traceability by using electronic tagging for livestock, and that there is no technical obstacle to its use for cattle, buffalo, sheep and goats. The results obtained show that these systems could be applied to animal species under widely differing conditions: intensive and extensive farming, transport within and outside the EU, different slaughter techniques, and the extreme environmental conditions in the north and the south of the EU.
Supporting the results of the IDEA project, the Commission presented a draft proposal for a Council regulation laying down a system of identification and registration for animals of ovine and caprine species. The Commission's proposed regulation will strengthen existing measures, particularly by gradually introducing a permanent tagging system to identify each animal in every Member State, and to follow the individual movement of sheep and goats. The proposed regulation on sheep and goat identification aims to improve animal health, the monitoring of livestock movement, and aid monitoring, thus affording greater levels of protection to all consumers within Europe. The Standing Committee on the Food Chain and Animal Health will use the IDEA project conclusions to adopt guidelines and extra procedures for the application of electronic identification: guidelines and detailed technical procedures, test procedures and certification criteria for equipment, aids for database and communication protocol standardisation. If necessary, the Commission will present a report to Council before the end of 2005, which will be based on the experience acquired once electronic identification is implemented.