Is your food industry being forced out of business by nasty foreign importers who insist on selling a similar product at half the price? Don’t worry: just start a health scare. It’s cheap, it’s rapid and the World Trade Organisation hasn’t yet got to grips with the possibilities for promoting protectionism via fear.
Last week the American journal Science published a paper by a team from the University of Albany, New York reporting high levels of various contaminants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs), dioxins and DDT in Scottish farmed salmon. Already one Scottish salmon farm has been driven out of business. It turns out that this is not the first difficulty that the Scottish salmon industry has had in selling its products in America. Over the past year, 27 shipments of Scottish salmon have been turned back from America on the basis of fears of listeria contamination — in spite of there being no recorded cases of people contracting the disease from eating salmon.
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