"Beef Boomerang" The Wall Street Journal (1 June 2004)

It's enough to make you wonder if it's only the cows who are mad. Back in December, when a solitary Holstein in Washington state was diagnosed with bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- BSE, better known as mad cow disease -- dozens of countries responded by closing the door to American beef. Though some have since eased restrictions, many of the biggest markets for U.S. beef (Japan, South Korea) continue to be blocked even though the science tells us we've got a handle on the situation. 

You might think this calls for a meaty U.S. protest about double-dealing foreigners invoking bogus "safety" concerns to throw up new protectionist walls against a perfectly fine American product? Well, there's just one inconvenient fact: The foreigners are following our lead. 

That's right. If ever there were a Grade A example of how high-handed U.S. policies toward imports can take a bite out of U.S. exports, our beef policy would be it. It started last May, when another cow -- this one in Alberta, Canada -- was found to have BSE. The U.S. Department of Agriculture responded by shutting off imports of both beef and live cattle from north of the border. Canadians are still mad about that one, and rightly so. 

But then a not-so-funny thing happened. Scarcely six months later, another infected cow turned up, but this time in Washington state. And though this cow had been imported from Canada, other countries responded to the outbreak in America pretty much the same way we had responded to the Canadians: to wit, by shutting their borders to our beef. 

In a recent Oval Office meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, President Bush declared that he was committed to seeing that the beef trade is restored "as soon as possible." He said too that he hoped decisions about how to handle mad cow would be based on "sound science." 

Unfortunately, the status quo suits America's home-grown herd of protectionists all too well. Led by the folks at R-CALF USA (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America), they succeeded last month in getting a federal judge to impose a temporary restraining order on a USDA attempt to restore some economic and scientific sanity to U.S. beef policy. 

And they are no idle threat. In this election year, John Kerry and nine colleagues in the Senate recently signed a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman urging her to keep the ban in place. The letter attacked the Canadian safeguards and warned the Administration about allowing Canada to turn America into a "dumping ground" for bad beef. 

Leave aside that Canadians would argue that their testing is even more stringent than ours. The broader point is that we've learned a great deal about mad cow since the early 1990s, when the epidemic peaked in Britain. Primarily we've learned that the way to contain it is through the feeding chain, which we've done and which would arrest its spread even in the event that BSE popped up in a large number of cows. As for humans, the director of Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis puts the risk to Americans as about "as close to zero as you can get." 

Unfortunately, while we have the science today to handle mad cow, there's still no known cure for these irrational outbreaks of protectionism. 

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