Sam Setter's 'Pills': Traceability

The EU Commission is very much engaged in bringing traceability of our raw materials to the forefront of tannery management. But let’s reflect on this for a moment. In the industrial world traceability is a fact, and particularly where food is involved, traceability is a standard requirement for trading. This is firstly to ensure food safety and secondly to ensure product security, particularly of imported items (though there is a significant trade in illegally imported materials, which obviously escapes controls). Now, why do we so urgently need traceability in our industry? To stop deforestation which is totally unrelated to the tanning industry? Nonsense! To ensure that a calf that was born in Libya, walked over the border to Chad (no passport, papers or travel agency), then, slaughtered and flayed, took the bus onward to Nigeria? Rubbish! Or do we want to know which family raised a cow, a goat or a sheep in Bangladesh, where it was offered with another 10+ million animals during the Eid Al Adha or Qurbani sacrifice that lasts 4 days? Or the 8-10 million animals offered during the same period in Pakistan, where they fetch an estimated US$1.8 billion live, but whose hides and skins afterwards have little or no value? Consider the near subsistence farming conditions in which these animals are raised – doesn’t traceability sound ridiculous? Even tracing 100 000 or 500 000 skins would be a drop in the ocean! NGOs and their counterparts in these countries celebrate ‘the huge success’ of tracing a 1 000 hides or skins here or there. But they would NEVER be able to trace all the live animals, let alone the hides and skins. So what are the industrialised countries going to do? Stop importing hides and skins directly or indirectly from non-compliant countries? What are those countries in that case going to do with their hides and skins? Let them rot and pollute the environment? The geniuses who claim to protect the environment in reality are doing exactly the opposite. And we, the industry, what do we do? What can we do? Most of the industry is silent and leaves it to a minority to engage in the battle against an ignorant or wilfully anti-leather opposition. Why? Money makes the world go ‘round!