Animal traceability across national frontiers in the European Union

The authors identify the fundamental requirements of a new information infrastructure for transnational animal tracking and tracing systems for use within the European Union. Relevant data for individual animals should include identification, movement history and health records. This must be maintained and available within each Member State, and should be available to other Member States on demand. A prerequisite for effective traceability is a system of unique and secure identification based on tamper-proof/tamper-evident identifiers linked directly to a database. An effective transnational traceability system requires an information infrastructure that will support the following: accuracy of information, completeness of information, common standards for interpreting data relating to animals and fast response to tracking and tracing requests. Information technology has advanced rapidly in the period since the existing animal movement control systems for Europe were first developed in the mid-1980s. The authors discuss the opportunity to use new technologies to enhance the existing systems. In particular, extensible markup language (XML) can be used to address many of the problems with data standards and interchanges in the existing infrastructure.