BeefStocker USA has created a spreadsheet to estimate the cost of the RFID tagging component of compliance with NAIS.

But as NoNAIS points out,

Ag Observatory published two somewhat contradictory stories from the newswires on March 15th that both relate to the discovery of the third case of mad cow disase. The first deals with legistlators who are capitalizing on this discovery to make the National Agricultural Identification System (NAIS) for tracing cattle mandatory. Right now it's voluntary, and as this article states,

About 10 percent of the 2 million premises nationwide have been registered.

They fail to mention, however, that these are mostly the largest feedlots and slaughterhouses.

Meanwhile, the other article outlines the USDA's plans to reduce the amount of testing of cattle at the time of slaughter.

Check out Vanadana Shiva's article about India's Proposed Food Safety & Standards Bill. One excerpt:

While food hazards grow, food safety laws are being shaped which deregulate large corporations and over-regulate the small scale self organized economy. Such industrial food safety standards promote large scale globalised production, and act against local foods. These laws are also the basis of the Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Agreement of WTO.

Shiva is one of the best critics of the WTO and this article is a case in point. However, in focusing on the WTO, she overlooks corporate para-state institutions like EurepGAP, which actually bypass the WTO by one-upping it on free market rhetoric by suggesting that their policies merely reflect the demands of its ("sovereign"?) consumer base.

According to the Business Standard entitled `EU standards bleed Indian traders':

In some cases, the cost of complying with the EU standards [i.e. EurepGAP] is as high as 65 per cent of the production cost of the goods, with the high cost of EU compliance certificates and the lack of availability of certifying agencies in the country making exporting to the EU difficult, the survey said.

Note that even though Eurep, which operates EurepGAP, is a consortium of entirely private firms, this article in the Business Standard basically equates exporting to EurepGAP to exporting to the EU.

Here's an example of micro traceability technology being used by a progressive business.

When you buy a carton of organic soy milk from Organic Valley, you can enter the date of expiration on the their website, and find out who grew the soybeans that your milk was made from.

While i really like this idea, i can't help but feel a bit unsure about whether or not this is the kind of transparency that we should be looking for. I'm all for transparency, meeting the farmers etc., but doesn't this also contribute to fetishizing the commodity? If i'm going to fetishize something, i'd rather it be the very progressive and successful institution that allowed a farmer to cooperate with other farmers, act as good stewards of the land, and succeed.

On a related note:

In a great article in The New York Times it was reported that when Wal-Mart demanded they reduce their prices by 20%, Organic Valley balked, and walked away from what is probably their biggest customer.

Kenyan newspaper The Standard is reporting about changes to the export market for cut flowers. 

The small-scale farmers have been unable to meet the high cost of certification required by foreign certifying bodies. "This is why the Government through financial support from the development partners are developing a programme to keep the small scale farmers afloat," said Muriithi. The small-scale farmers, who accounted for more than half of Kenya’s flowers export market a decade ago, now supply less than ten per cent of the total export volumes.

What's interesting is that this is a public body in Kenya dealing with a private body in Europe (Eurepgap).