Mexico Starts Implementing Traceability System

The Mexican government recently implemented a traceability system that allows the possibility of finding and tracking food, this allows a reconstruction of the traceability, use, or location of a product. The objective of implementing this traceability is to raise levels of protection for food production and consumer health. This issue has been coming up for some time now; there have even been agreements between Mexico and the US to strengthen food security.  

According to Beetrack, a traceability system “allows you to have all the historical information of a product or batch. This way, such information could be accessed in case it deemed necessary. For example, it can happen in the event of withdrawing a batch of a defective product.” The benefits of traceability are: 

• Individualized control of the batch of stock
• Improved product management in stock
• It controls the evolution of the product
• It identifies and solves problems efficiently
• It withdrawals products selectively 

Traceability systems are also divided into two categories, internal traceability, which is the process that happens when the product is still inside the company, and external traceability, which are the processes to which a product is subjected outside the company, reports Beetrack. 

The National Service of Agrifood Health, Safety and Quality (Senasica), is implementing this system in order to achieve health and safety for consumers and business partners. The idea is to be able to be clear about the origin of the product, its transit and final destination, reported the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER). 

In case there is a sanitary emergency, it is very important to activate this system to locate agricultural, aquaculture and fishing merchandise quickly, in case any of them represent a sanitary danger, proper measures and actions could be established to control and eradicate the risk. According to an official release, goods will be identified with unique and unrepeatable codes in order to have individual, batch and group information. 

Implementing this system could also bring benefits to Mexican producers because health authorities of some countries impose the use of traceability systems throughout each of the stages of the agri-food chain, as mentioned in a Traceability study by Alimentos Argentinos. As mentioned in the same study, one of the consequences of globalization is taking the food from one place to another, where unfortunate risks could take place, such as contamination in some parts of the journey or the loss of the cold chain. We can conclude that the implementation of traceability minimizes risks.