THE claim that Australia needs to embrace individual sheep identification to protect access to the European Union market appears to be a furphy when you look at the New Zealand situation.

The fact is NZ has no sheep ID program at all, and has no plans to introduce one, yet it sells more than 200,000 tonnes of lamb to the EU each year.

Questions need to be asked when the biggest lamb-exporting nation in the world does not feel the need to impose an ID program for its sheep flock to maintain market access, which is an argument peddled here in Australia.

The NZ sheep industry is heavily reliant on exports, as evidenced by information about the country on websites such as the NZ Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

"NZ's sheep industry is very dependent on international meat prices and market access, with the EU market of particular significance for lamb," it states.

NZ exports almost 90 per cent of the lamb it produces, with the EU market taking 51 per cent in terms of volume shipped and 62 per cent in terms of value.

Therefore, if anyone should be panicking about the EU introducing mandatory electronic ID for its flock next year, you would think it would be the Kiwis.

Australia's quota share of the EU market is tiny at 18,650 tonnes, while NZ's share is 227,600 tonnes.

NZ authorities are currently building an ID system known as National Animal Identification and Traceability.

However, at this stage, it is only for cattle and deer, with the voluntary launch set for June next year and mandatory ID to start in June 2011.

When asked this week why sheep hadn't been included in NAIT, MAF spokesman Chris Houston said that the market drivers and forces on the world stage were "stronger" for beef and venison, compared with sheepmeat.

When pushed on the subject of the EU he said, "You could make the observation that what becomes standard practice in the EU becomes a knock-on for other countries. But it doesn't necessary mean that they will require X, Y or Z (from other countries that supply meat to them)."

Mr Houston said while the NAIT would be built so it could handle the ID details of other species, at this stage there were "no plans" to involve sheep.

Again, it begs the question of why certain sectors in the Australian industry seem hell-bent on pushing individual sheep ID when it doesn't appear needed for market access.

Especially as it will come at a cost to farmers, many of whom are already struggling to cope with tight profit margins.

According to reports, the NSW Department of Primary Industries has found that the gross margin for a second-cross lamb enterprise would be reduced by 5 per cent if the owners had to eartag at a cost of $1.30 a tag.

If the eartags cost $2.30 each, the gross margin would be slashed by 7 per cent.

Sheepmeat Council of Australia's Ron Cullen maintains that no country that is buying Australian lamb or mutton is demanding individual animal ID.

"The individual animal ID argument is a furphy and all it is doing is leading to confusion and unnecessary debate that sidetracks the industry and looks bad for us overseas," he said.

Mr Cullen said reports about EU inspectors finding faults with Australia's sheep traceability system had been over-played.

He said the incident involved one abattoir where three lots of lambs from a market had been boxed in lairage, and when they went through the kill chain, the EU inspectors said they couldn't tell which lamb came from which property.

The Australian authorities argued that if any problems had come up with the carcasses, they would have traced back to the three properties and an investigation completed.

"The incident that occurred was never about electronic ID but being able to trace back to a property, but the whole report got blown out of proportion," Mr Cullen said.

"Even if the EU demands greater traceability in the future, we could still do that without electronic tagging."