Industry Insight: what standards must Mercosur beef meet?

Full traceability in national cattle herds is a relatively recent development, with the EU to the forefront not for animal health or welfare reasons but originally for the management of EU payments.

It was the development of BSE in the UK and to a lesser extent Ireland in the 1990s and discovery of its existence in mainland Europe in the year 2000 that made traceability an integral part of the EU’s animal health and food safety strategy.

Currently the EU requires that calves are registered to national databases by the time they are 28 days old with their unique identification numbers.

Every movement to other farms or marts must be recorded on their passports.

While this is standard practice in the EU, it is not elsewhere in the world, including North and South American countries, with the exception of Uruguay.

North and South American countries have huge domestic markets

Part of the reason is that BSE was very much an EU disease, concentrated in the UK and to a lesser extent in the EU, with only isolated cases in the rest of the world.

More importantly, North and South American countries have huge domestic markets.

Brazil, for example, is the world’s biggest exporter of beef, at 2m tonnes, but this only represents 20% of its production and the remaining 80% is consumed in its domestic market.

Therefore, beef production in the US, Canada or Brazil isn’t exactly the same as in the EU.

However, the EU will approve beef supplies from non-EU or third countries provided they have equivalent standards.

What this means in practice is that while the systems and controls are different, they achieve the same outcome and are therefore satisfactory.

Farms and factories that want to supply the EU have to go through a registration process to become accredited.

These farms will have full animal identification, though not on the same time scale as calf registration within the first 28 days.

The approval process for these farms is carried out by the national authorities but is audited by the EU visits which take place every couple of years.

Approval of factories is carried out directly by the EU much in the same way as Chinese authorities have to visit Irish factories to complete the approval process.

In Brazil, there are 1,637 farm businesses currently approved to produce cattle that qualify for beef export to the EU.

While the number of farm businesses may appear relatively small, these are usually huge businesses producing huge numbers of cattle.

Argentina has 20 factories currently approved to export to the EU while Uruguay has 26 factories approved

These will be supplied to one of the 112 beef factories that are approved for export to the EU, with the fact that this is four times the number of Irish factories that process over 20,000 cattle annually again demonstrating the sheer size of the Brazilian industry.

Argentina has 20 factories currently approved to export to the EU while Uruguay has 26 factories approved.

In Canada, there is frustration with the approval process. The restricted use of acid in processing is their main grievance.

They believe it offsets the benefit of having a beef quota.

Export procedure

Consignments from these factories that are exported to the EU have to be accompanied by an animal health and sanitary cert and only boneless beef can be sent to the EU as part of the EU’s management of the threat from foot-and-mouth disease.

As well as the document being checked on arrival in the EU, a physical sample is taken from each consignment for veterinary inspection before it is released on to the EU market.

Discoveries of breaches have been a regular feature of EU veterinary inspection visits throughout the past decade

While the controls aren’t exactly the same as in the EU, they are still robust. However, as the Irish Farmers Journal demonstrated over a decade ago and was more recently shown in Operation Weak Flesh, a Brazilian police investigation in March 2017, the practice doesn’t always match the theory.

Discoveries of breaches have been a regular feature of EU veterinary inspection visits throughout the past decade.

Given the cavalier approach of Brazilian President Bolsonaro to rain forest clearance, it will be interesting to observe future EU audit reports on the implementation of controls on farms and factories approved to export to the EU.

Irish farmers with the threat of a cross compliance penalty hanging over them for late registration of a calf won’t understand how anything less from a third country can be considered acceptable, and this has become the focal point of farmer opposition to Mercosur.

However, the reality is the EU has the gold standard in terms of traceability.

Comparing it to an exam, the EU standard would score 100% but a much lower score would get a pass and a top grade can be achieved with considerably less than 100%.

The best chance of successful opposition to the Mercosur deal is at political level and Brazil’s current practice on rainforest clearance is out of step with replanting 12m hectares by 2030.

On this there is no equivalence.

The forest is either being cleared or it isn’t and replanting is either taking place or it isn’t. A debate on standards can be fudged, but on the environment it is black and white.