Agricultural Sciences in China 2010, 9(1): 147-156 January 2010 © 2010, CAAS. All rights reserved. Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi: 10.1016/S1671- 2927(09)60078-X This paper is translated from its Chinese version in Scientia Agricultura Sinica. Correspondence XIONG Ben-hai, Professor, Tel: +86-10-62811680 , Fax: +86-10-62815988, E-mail: bhxiong@iasc aas.net.cn A Solution on Pork Quality Traceability from Farm to Dinner Table in Tianjin City, China XIONG Ben-hai 1 , FU Run-ting 2 , LIN Zhao-hui 2 , LUO Qing-yao 1 , YANG Liang 1 and PAN Jia-rong 3 1 Institute of Animal Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences/State Key Laboratory of Animal Nutrition, Beijing 100193, P.R. China 2 Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau, Tianjin 300210, P.R.China 3 Institute of Manufacture of Agricultural Food, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100193, P.R.China Abstract In order to meet government supervision of pork production safety as well as consumer’s right to know what they buy and protect the public safety of pork food, this study adopts animal identification, intelligent personal digital assistant (PDA) reading and writing, general packet radio service (GPRS), and other information technologies, proposes a pork tracking and traceability inferstructure based on pork production substrace flow and data flow, designs the metadata structure and related datatbases for farming, slaug htering, and retailin g sector based on intensive pig farmi ng and smallhold pig farming , develops three different data-recording systems, and finally establishes a public network platform for the information inquiry in light of “the administrative rules on identification and rearing files for animal and poultry” in China. The farming process information system supplies early warning for the usage of drugs and feed additives based on data of every individual pig and timely uploading all events data to remote traceability database when pigs are sold; the PDA data collecting system can collect farming events data for pigs fed by farmers and submit to the center database by GPRS; the web-based Tianjin’s pork traceability platform can integrate all identifications and related pork quality data from farming, slaughtering to marketing by online, and achieve pork tracking from product origin to consumption and tracing in the turn- over direction. It is feasible to realize pork quality traceability by identification technologies developed and/or integrated, metadata specifications designed, three data-recording systems developed, and web-inquiring platform established. Some individual technical bottlenecks will be resolved with the development of communication technologies. The full implementation in Tianjin, China, will supply technical support for guaranteeing the quality and safety of pork production and meeting consumer’s demands. Key words: animal identification, pork, tracking, traceability, PDA, GPRS INTRODUCTION There has been m ore than 10 yr since the attenti on to prod - uct traceability on food supply chain, and it earlist stemed from the occurrence of meat and milk consumption event in Europe. The most prominent risk is cow sponginess brain illness (BSE), name ly mad cow dis- ease and is human’s variety (Thompson et al. 2005; Madec et al. 2001). In China, the risk which is well known, occures from time to time is the toxicant event which the contrary use of clenobuterol hydrochloride in the pork production. Since 1998, such incidents have occurred about 18 times by offical reports, and first in Jiangsu Province and Shanghai, China (People’s Daily Online 2006a), then spread to other provinces and
