Traceability has been a bit of a bumpy road of late in our industry. We've had a national ID program for 12 years. Producers have been paying for their portion of traceability for over a decade now. What we lack to make that system effective in our sector, and I think in all but the hog sector...in the pork industry they have a full traceability system, but four of our species groups that will be regulated to it have yet to complete that list.
It requires a database to manage the information, primarily, because traceability is all about information management. We see some challenges in being able to keep that infrastructure in place. In addition to having supported the cost of the producers' portion of traceability, there's an expectation, at least in what we've seen in the traceability negotiations so far, that the producers have to support the full cost of traceability. That means data management, and that means managing the information and ensuring those databases are in place. That's a very costly venture.
As an example, in the sheep sector, aside from the price of tags, aside from a producer's time to report information and manage the information on a farm, and aside from all the other stakeholders' investments in time and reporting capacity, the database is expected to cost just our sector in excess of $130,000 annually. For an industry of 11,000 producers, that's a significant cost.
When we talk about traceability models and the gold standard of what a traceability program looks like, we often refer to countries like Australia and the system they have. We also know that their government funds that database management, that very costly portion of it. There are some security risks to be had with privatizing that information, first and foremost, and then there's a concern over what that increased cost means for a producer's cost of production on an animal and whether producers can sustain that in the long term. If they can't support the cost of it, then there isn't a program when the federal government isn't supporting it, at least in some capacity.