Development of agri-products traceability in main developed agriculture region of the world

Abstract: Nowadays, agri-products production and distribution systems are becoming more and more interdependent, integrated, and globalized. The two main themes toward agri-products around the modern world include maintaining safety and improving quality. Based on the information communication technologies (ICTs) and the internet of things (IOT) technologies, traceability through the entire agri-products supply chain will effectively address safety, quality, and defense issues of agri-products by providing precise, real-time, transparent, and reliable information from the farm to the table. Traceability systems are capable of minimizing the degree of information asymmetry between producers and consumers by collecting and sharing information among all partners of the supply chain, promoting the agri-products safety responsibility by implement track and trace functions along the supply chain, and helping strengthen confidence of the customers toward agri-products. Since traceability systems are becoming an important tool for monitoring and managing agri-product flows through the supply chains, many developing and developed countries around the world put great focus on them and try to introduce traceability into various kinds of agri-products supply chains. This review described and summarized the latest progress of the agri-products traceability development in the most advanced regions of agriculture produce all over the world, which comprised three main aspects: laws and regulations, standards and norms, and promotion and implementation.The agri-product traceability legal system has been developed in the Europe Union (EU), which puts "No. 178/2002 Act" at its core. It is divided into two levels: the upper level is the basic laws that set general principles, relatively; the lower level is specific articles and requirements for different kinds of agri-products based on the upper level. The EU started the Promoting European Traceability Excellence & Research (PETER) project from 2002, which was composed of a consortium of nine members coordinating nine traceability research projects, such as SEAFOODplus, FoodTrace, et al. In the United States, the "H.R. 3448 Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002" and "H.R. 2751 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act" are the two traceability acts of great importance. It started the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in 2005, but turned to Animal Disease Traceability (ADT) and focused on the traceability for the livestock moving interstate due to high cost and the cumbersome process of NAIS in 2011. The IFT of the US had launched the Global Food Traceability Center in July 2013. It will serve as an unbiased, knowledgeable, and science-based advisor that advances insight and understanding of food traceability and focuses on eliminating the gaps in the research, development, and the need for implementation of system-wide food traceability. Canada published a new "Safe Food for Canadians Act" to strengthen food traceability in 2012 and established the Can-Trace agency to promote food traceability early in 2004. In 2013, Canada proposed the "Safe Food for Canadians Action Plan (SFCAP)" to improve the food safety system further. Japan had established a comprehensive food safety law system, but only published two traceability acts for beef and rice. The Food Marketing Research & Information Center (FMRIC) developed a number of standards and guidelines for several kinds of agri-products, such as beef, pork, fish, chicken, fruit, and vegetables. Japan promotes agri-product traceability with the audit and certification system to ensure the authenticity and integrity of traceability information. The traceability laws in Korea include: the "Food Safety Basic Act", the "Food Sanity Act", the "High Quality Agri-product Bill", the "Agri-product Quality Control Act" and the "Cow and Beef Traceability Act". The Korea Rural Development Administration (RDA) began a series of pilot traceability projects from 2004, and promoted agricultural traceability in large scale in 2006. Today, several representative traceability system are running well in Korea, such as cattle, pig, fish, et al. Taiwan started agri-product traceability in 2004 and published the "Agricultural Production and Certification Act" to develop food traceability formally in 2007. Based on amendments of several traceability laws and standards, Taiwan launched "The Project of Traceability Cloud Application on Safe Food" to integrate small traceability systems into one system in November 2013.Conclusions can be drawn based on the above mentioned review: Improvement of the legal system and constantly retroactive amendments and improvements; Development of detailed traceability standards and specifications; Combination of mandatory or voluntary certification (verification) mechanism; Establishment of full-time regulatory agencies at the national level; Combination of mandatory promotion at the national level and voluntary establishment at industry level; Development of information system integration and refinement of trace items are the development trends. China could draw lessons from these systems from the world's most advanced regions of agriculture produce in agri-product traceability developments, and it will promote the more advanced agri-product traceability system for ourselves.