Rationale

The rationale for the OTAG SSA project comes from the clearly identified needs and demands, in the beef production sector in Southern Cone Countries to:

have to implement an improved traceability system for extensive cattle production to respect the EU regulations on food safety and quality for beef production;

develop a risk assessment and crises management tools for extensive beef producers, national authorities and policy makers;

promote an efficient, accurate and updatable databases on beef production practices as well as decisional information on quality and safety issues;

adapt and optimize existing and emerging geospatial technologies to improve quality products and agricultural practices in beef production sector taken into account the inexistence of a cadastral or land parcel information system (LPIS);

OTAG consortium proposes to develop and puts in place an operational and integrated geodecisional system (to attempt the previous issues) to track and trace emerging risks in beef extensive production as well as risk management that will be acceptable, workable and usable by the scientific community and actors associated to the beef sector.
The overall goal of OTAG is therefore to strengthen consumer confidence through a sustainable and easily understood extensive beef production and risk management scheme, which is financially acceptable by all stakeholders. OTAG will focus on providing (i) an innovative, economically viable, spatially explicit methods and tools for recording accurate and reliable data on primary production practices at the farm level, including animal condition, mobility, origin, and quality. OTAG will develop a cutting edge system to track and trace emerging risks in beef production based on standardized, factual trace data in an easily understood and easily accessible format, and that take in account the Brazilian production context (animal mobility, number of animals, size of the farm and herd, etc.). The OTAG system will also consider all information that is acceptable, workable and usable by all actors in the beef production chain as well as for primary producers in case of a crisis event. Because OTAG provides retro-traceability, it will become a reference system for crisis management helping decision makers to limit the impact of possible crises and to facilitate the product withdrawal. OTAG will create:

New added value for primary beef producers (market niche of products through better traceability, differentiation of products, management, regulations…)

New services for the intermediaries that will have to trace and track cattle as well as managing risks or potential crises.

New operational tools and system for Southern Cone Countries to follow EU regulations.

Through geo-referenced and product information, the geodecisional information system OTAG will provide verifiable facts as well as information on origin and movement of the animal and the history of its life, adherence to production standards, enabling quality and authenticity to be guaranteed and risk assessment and crises management tools for policy markers. In line with EU regulations, OTAG demonstration system will be linked to the traceability information recorded by authorized organism operators throughout the upward beef production chain of Southern Cone Countries (SCC).