One of the biggest upheavals in food production in the last 10 years was the result of one of the tiniest, most unimaginable scares.
It would be comparable to one single Aborigine threatening the U.S. with a flyswatter, and our government issuing every homeowner a .50-caliber machine gun to defend themselves!
Peruse ag media today and you will see multiple companies offering age and source verification for cattle.
The biggest impetus for this technical, political and management service was the BSE/Mad Cow scare. It began in Great Britain in 1996 and was connected to human deaths from Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.
Once they diagnosed the connection between BSE and C-J, the British bit the bullet and began their eradication program, but not before the whole world had a global fright worthy of Orson Wells, “War of the Worlds!”
Over a period of time, random cases were diagnosed in Canada, Korea, Japan and Europe.
In 2003, the U.S. made its first diagnosis.
At the peak of random testing, the number of positives compared to the cow population was less than a grain of sand in the Sahara.
Meat-eaters around the world soon realized their own personal risk was less than getting hit by an armadillo dropped from the sky. Yet governments have continued to restrict imports of beef from each other, mostly for political reasons and market protection.
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