From Swine Fever to TRACES NT: The History Behind EU Certification

Most compliance systems are built quietly. TRACES was built out of a crisis.

A disease outbreak that changed EU trade rules

After the 1997 classical swine fever outbreak, the European Parliament pushed the Commission to improve how animal movements were tracked. The Commission responded by merging two older systems, ANIMO and SHIFT, into a single architecture under Decision 2003/24/EC. Months later, Decision 2003/623/EC gave the platform its name.

Two decades of expansion

TRACES Classic launched in 2004 for intra-EU animal movements and imports. An IMPORT module followed in 2006, letting non-EU countries issue certificates directly. By 2013, the platform had expanded into plant health, and a modern rebuild, TRACES NT, arrived in 2017. Our **EU TRACES history and milestones guide** sets out the full timeline, including the 2019 rule that made the Common Health Entry Document mandatory for anything entering the EU.

By 2022, TRACES Classic was retired for good, with more than 2.3 million documents signed electronically that year alone. In 2024, the platform turned 20 and swapped its analytics tool, QlikView, for Qlik Sense.

Why the history matters today

None of this is trivia. Every legacy rule still shapes how certificates and establishment codes behave now, including which facilities can be delisted and how fast. Teams that understand the system’s evolution spot risk faster than those treating TRACES as a black box.

**Watch a demo**