The farm ministry has begun developing a system to numerically label every package of beef to show consumers the birthplace of the cow it is from and the farms where it was raised, ministry sources said Sunday.

The introduction of the system, dubbed "traceability," is aimed at restoring public trust in beef in the wake of the discovery in September of Japan's first case of mad cow disease, the sources said.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has had trouble tracing the cows that were raised at the same farms that bred the cow in question, which was born in Hokkaido and was later sold to a farm in Chiba Prefecture.

The ministry has been unable to determine how the cow contracted mad cow disease.

The ministry will launch a pilot project around January by linking a stock farm in Hokkaido with retailers in Osaka Prefecture, they said.

The ministry has commissioned the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, which maintains a marketing channel between the Hokkaido farm and co-op supermarkets in Osaka, to develop the system and implement the pilot project.

Ministry officials will also launch a task force with scholars and health ministry officials by the end of this month to discuss the details of the traceability system, according to the sources.

The farm ministry eventually hopes to establish a system whereby consumers can search via the Internet to find out where the beef they eat at home came from, where it was processed and other information, they said.

The ministry plans to carry out a similar experiment on vegetables and processed foods.

In 2000, the European Union obliged its 15 member states to adopt the traceability system on beef following the spread of mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), across the continent.

France has included vegetables, fish and shellfish in its system.

The system is designed to build consumer trust in the safety of foodstuffs, and will also help detect shipping routes in the event of food poisoning, farm ministry officials said.

Following the outbreaks of food poisoning caused by the 0-157 strain of the E. coli bacteria in recent years, the ministry began a feasibility study on traceability for rice, tomatoes and processed food using eggs.

The ministry initially planned to begin similar studies on beef in the next fiscal year or later, but decided to move up the schedule due to the continuing mad cow scare.

BSE was first detected in Britain in 1986 and is believed to arise from cows being fed infected meat-and-bone meal, which contains parts of other cows.

Human consumption of infected beef is thought to cause a new variant of the fatal human disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. BSE has led to the deaths of more than 100 people in Europe.