| In
the wake of last Thursday's decision by a three-judge panel
of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reopen the U.S.-Canada
border to shipments of live cattle, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture has said only that it will officially reopen
the border “soon.”
Nevertheless,
representatives of the U.S. beef industry, which has been
hurt by the ban on Canadian cattle, instituted in May 2003
when the Canadian government admitted that a cow infected
with bovine spongiform encephelopathy (BSE) had been found
in the province of Alberta, were enthusiastic about the
court's decision. “Once the trade can resume, the normal
balance of North American trade can be put in place," Rosemary
Mucklow, executive director of the National Meat Association,
told the New York Times. “This is very good news.” Commented
Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute:
“We've waited two years for the border to open, and we are
grateful that the court has ruled on the side of science.
The court's expeditious ruling is a vindication of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's thoughtful, science-based rulemaking
process that would have lifted the embargo in March had
a lower court not granted a preliminary injunction against
the rule. U.S. and Canadian beef are safe. U.S. and Canadian
cattle are healthy.”
The
ruling overturned a lower court's injunction against a USDA
plan to reopen the border. The lawsuit against USDA had
been brought by the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund
United Stockgrowers of American, or R-CALF USA. Unsurprisingly,
Bill Bullard, president of R-CALF, saw the ruling differently
than other U.S. industry representatives. He called the
ruling “disappointing,” and noted: “The Ninth Circuit gave
no reasons for their action, so there isn't much we can
do until we see those reasons. R-CALF USA remains confident
that USDA's final rule was not justified, and that USDA
did not provide significant justification for overturning
a long-standing policy that protected both the U.S. cattle
herd and U.S. consumers from the introduction of BSE.” He
said USDA's plan to reopen the border, which the court's
ruling vindicated, “is based merely on a reinterpretation
of existing science that has been around for years. USDA
is motivated by political considerations of wanting to resume
trade with Canada.”
According
to the Times, since the appeal concerned measures in Canada
to test for the presence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or mad cow disease, the judges did not have to consider
the positive mad cow result found last month in a cow from
Texas. To date, four BSE-infected cows have been found in
Canada, and two have been found in the United States. The
first of those two, an animal located on a ranch in Washington
state, had been born in Canada. The second, a 12-year-old
Brahma cross, was the first U.S.-born BSE-infected cow that
has been officially acknowledged by USDA and the industry.
The
original injunction against USDA's plan to reopen the border
was issued on 5 March of this year in district court in
Billings, Mont., by Judge Richard Cebull, and now the action
returns to Judge Cebull's courtroom. A hearing is scheduled
for 27 July in Billings to consider a request to grant a
permanent injunction to keep Canadian cattle from entering
the United States. However, with no explanation available
of the appeals court decision, it was not clear how Thursday's
ruling would affect the Montana proceeding.
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