The last couple of months have seen a lot of Canadian head shaking and facepalming as the second Trump administration settles into the White House.
Tariffs, unsurprisingly, have been the vanguard of that dismay for Canadian farmers.
U.S. President Donald Trump roared into office in January with policies that, if implemented, seemed to leave little room to avoid a trade war with its closest trading partners. Since then, the on-again-off-again tariff chaos between Canada, China, Mexico, and, as of the beginning of April, a lot of the rest of the world, with the U.S. sent markets reeling. Meanwhile Canadian farmers are trying to get some sense of what’s even worth planting this year.
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But it’s not just the U.S.’s sudden love for trade protectionism that’s been sparking concern north of the border. Canadians have also watched other bits of internal U.S. news with reactions ranging from resignation to horror.
Such was the case last month, after U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested in comments to Fox News that, rather than culling poultry flocks that have had a confirmed case of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the U.S. should instead let the infection burn through the flock, in the hopes of identifying birds resistant to the virus in the aftermath.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had also made comments to Fox News (widely reported by media) that some U.S. farms are willing to pull back infection-related culls “on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity.”
Unsurprisingly, many veterinary and human health experts responded with alarm.
One veterinarian quoted by Global News, Dr. Rocio Crespo of the North Carolina State University of Veterinary Medicine, likened the idea of letting bird flu rip through flocks as “putting Ebola in the middle of New York City and not isolating people.”
In comments to the New York Times, former Kansas state veterinarian and epidemiologist Dr. Gail Hansen also didn’t mince words.
“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” she said, pointing to the general lack of genetic diversity in modern commercial poultry. Others in the same article argued that it would actually increase disruption and financial loss to the poultry sector, since barns would be locked down longer.
Other experts in the wake of Kennedy’s suggestion noted the tactic would give the virus many more chances to figure out inter-species transmission —alarming, since bird flu has had several dozen human cases and two deaths in North America over the last year, not to mention the strain of the virus circulating in U.S. dairy cows.
But one more point, made further down in the New York Times article and almost as a side note, should give the U.S. agriculture industry pause. Given the recent faults in the foundation of international trade, world markets would likely shut their doors to U.S. poultry and poultry products if there was a perception that bird flu was being left to run amok.
More recent news dealing with deep U.S. federal staff cuts have done little to quench any concern in that regard.
On April 4, Reuters reported massive that staffing cuts meant that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was backing away from their work to improve bird flu testing for commercial items like milk. An initiative that would have included over 40 U.S. labs also hit the chopping block.
As of April 9, Reuters was reporting yet more staff cuts, this time from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and among staff part of the U.S.’s bird flu response.
As Jeff Melchior reported in last week’s main story, the U.S. poultry and egg sector is huge. Their flock is counted in the multi billions. The USDA also notes that the country is the second-largest poultry meat exporter in the world. American poultry is big business, and in needs markets outside its own borders.
But keeping things moving between international trading partners in the midst of an outbreak relies on both parties having demonstrated robust systems to monitor and come swiftly down on disease.
That’s the rationale underpinning zoning agreements: that some areas can be safe for industry to operate, with a reasonably low risk of importing the problem over your own borders.
If that faith starts to erode, so to do those safeguards that keep trade moving.
