I can't suppress a mean-spirited chuckle at the outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease and the slow spread of mad cow disease among European cattle. I say ?mean-spirited? because the simultaneous loss of cattle and collapse of demand for beef is going to be ruinous to some farmers who don't deserve it. On the other hand, it's delightful to see Mother Nature deliver such a dramatic poke in the eye to European protectionism.
It's a long-standing conflict. Europe and the US are perpetually engaged in a low-intensity economic war, each trying to keep up their own exports while sheltering home markets from the other's farms. Naturally, the air in the World Trade Organization is think with accusations of protectionism from both sides, and many of the accusations are correct: the US subsidizes home growers to undercut foreign markets, and the EU taxes imports heavily. There is always an excuse for taxing or restricting or banning altogether somebody else's produce.
A few years ago, it was bananas. US fruit companies operating out of Latin America were in a snit because several European countries, notably Britain with its own banana plantations in its former empire, wouldn't let American bananas in. They successfully sued the EU in the WTO to admit American bananas on equal footing, to no effect. England just dragged its feet and, pushed hard enough to comply with the ruling, replied ?Well? we're not gonna. Our case is right and the WTO is wrong, so we're not gonna.? And of course, the WTO had no real enforcement powers; that would tread on the sovereignty of member states. The threat of retaliation, or even the dissolution of the feeble WTO, worried the Economist no end.
And there's the grand hoopla over genetically modified produce, or ?frankenfoods.? Many Europeans are unaccountably afraid of produce making use of nascent genetic technology. I could accept complaints that frankenfoods, like vegetables bred for appearance and storage rather than flavor, don't taste good. I could accept concerns over the appearance of a specific allergen. I could accept condemnation upon a proven link to birth defects. But European consumers have seen enough horror films to realize the real problem is that eating the wrong DNA turns people into tentacled monsters or something equally awful. The rationale is that, since scientifically ignorant people don't understand it, it must be dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. Or it hasn't been tested enough. Or something. We might grow tentacles. And the trade lawyers wring their hands and plead there's nothing they can do; the public demands alarmist labeling.
With the discovery that some damn fool supplemented cattle feed with bone meal from the cows that had to be slaughtered because they were infected, all European beef and feed is suddenly suspect. The French could use soybean meal; it's cheap and readily available. But it comes from America, and has those icky gene splices. Fearing the outside chance that strange genes will harm their cows, the French are slaughtering them instead. I laugh.
Best of all, the US has placed tight controls on European beef, on the grounds of containing hoof-and-mouth. We haven't shown much concern over mad cow disease, but hoof-and-mouth, while not dangerous to humans, is horrendously communicable in animals. European trade lawyers who have argued that a ban on American fruit is warranted because it contains new protein now argue that a ban on European beef just because it contains actual disease bacteria is criminal protectionism. Oh, the hypocrisy!