Schneier on Security

Eric • January 26, 2007 2:26 AM

RFID are NOT a good idea for livestock.

While they may be a good idea for individual livestock owners to tag their livestock, that is not necessarily true. But that is their own decision.

There is a massive effort to develop a system for tagging all livestock in the U.S. today and force it on all livestock owners. It is couched in terms of food safety and prevention of disease, but it is, in reality, purely a marketing effort pushed by certain enormously large corporations.

It affects not only cattle, but horses, poultry, pigs, goats, sheep, and more. So every time a calf jumps a fence and gets in with the neighbors herd the farmer will have 24 hours to notify the government of the event. Every time one of a small homesteader’s chickens gets out into the roadway, the homesteader will have 24 hours to notify the government. Every time a cowboy takes his horse off his property to help a neighbor, he will have 24 hours to notify the government. Fail to notify the government, and there will be possible fines, maybe even forfeiture of the livestock, and in some cases the farmer/homesteader/cowboy may go to jail.

The threat usually cited is Mad Cow Disease. In reality, that has not been much of a problem at all in the United States. Ending Mad Cow Disease is much simpler than tagging livestock — don’t feed them neural tissue of dead livestock. In fact, it has been illegal to do that for some time.

In a few cases cattle with Mad Cow Disease have been imported into the U.S. from Canada. RFID tags would have made no difference. Those cattle were traced quickly and efficiently without creating another huge government bureacracy.

The real reason for the tagging effort is for marketing cattle to other countries, principally Japan. What goes unanswered is the question of why should all cattle in the U.S. be tagged for this purpose?

If someone wants to export their beef to Japan, they could accomplish the same thing by selling beef that has voluntarily beeen tagged and tracked since birth. Such animals would enjoy a bit of a premium which would most likely cover the cost of the tagging and tracking and at the same time those producing beef for their own use or for local markets would not be encumbered with a tedious and intrusive tracking system.

The fact is that the source of the occasional health problems in animal products is inevitably due to contamination at the packing plants. Nothing that whoever raised the animals can have any possible impact on the problem.

But with the animal tracking and our legal system, what we will see is that when someone gets sick or dies from an e-coli outbreak at some fast food joint, it will be possible to determine not only the packing plants where the contamination occurred, but everyone who ever owned the livestock prior to that. The lawyers, in their infinite wisdom, will use that information to file a lawsuit against everyone along the entire line.

While a meat packing company may be able to handle the lawsuits, some of the small farmers may only make $10,000 or $20,000 a year from their agricultural activities. Many may have even lost a few thousand dollars.

Imagine one outbreak of e-coli in the hamburger sales of one large chain. The beef involved may have ultimately come cattle purchased from hundreds of small farmers. Adding tens of thousands of dollars of legal expenses to their already limited income will only force them into bankruptcy and concentrate control among fewer and fewer large corporate farms.

It won’t help a single consumer at all, but it will likely increase meat prices to the benefit of the few who will be able to remain in business.

In reality, the entire scheme is nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to fool the consumer into thinking he is getting something that he is not. It will do nothing to protect any consumer from anything. It will do nothing to promote marketing of beef to Japan that a voluntary program for those few who actually will market their beef to Japan cannot easily accomplish.