Plant and animal quarantines are apt to be the touchiest spots in international trade relations. Every modern country feels the obligation to defend its livestock and its crops against the invasion from foreign countries of germs of contagious diseases, against parasites, insect pests and other kinds of crop enemies. But how far should such defense be carried? Perfect protection can be secured only by a 100 percent exclusion of all foreign plants and animals. Since this is obviously absurd, some reasonable compromise has to be worked out.
Another serious problem arises from the relation of import controls to domestic trade. It is clear that many measures of biological protection inevitably provide economic protection as well. The more foreign cattle that are excluded, the wider the market for domestic cattle. Hence, suspicion, often justified, attaches to all sanitary embargoes and quarantines. To the layman, the dictum of the biologists and entomologists, that practically all our most destructive animal diseases and crop enemies have been introduced from abroad, sounds like the outbreak of a peculiarly virulent xenophobia. But it is probably true. For, after all, practically all our domestic animals originally came from overseas, as did also the more important bread grains, fodder crops, fruit trees and ornamental shrubs. But all that is ancient history now. Two centuries of experimentation have resulted in control measures which make the unwelcome visitors much less destructive. The balance of nature has been at least partially reestablished; with due diligence, we can keep the pests under control. But there is always present the danger of new invasions, and, with the growing speed of transportation and frequency of service of steamers, trains and airplanes, the danger becomes each year more real. In the days of sailing vessels, an ocean voyage of six weeks rather thoroughly disposed of stowaway insects; their life cycle came to an end before the voyage was completed. Insects can now board an airplane in Guatemala or Venezuela and arrive safe and sound in Texas or Florida. It has been estimated that foreign countries harbor some 10,000 varieties of insects and plant parasites which have not yet made their appearance in the United States. In their native habitat, where they are in balance with their hosts and with other insects and parasites, they are not causing serious injury to plant life. But once introduced into the American environment, any one of them may so upset our balance as to prove a serious menace to our forests, our crops and our orchards.
These considerations justify rigid control of imports of foreign plants and animals through quarantine measures, and in some cases by embargoes.
Now it happened that although large areas of Argentina are infected, Patagonia is free from the disease. Consequently, the exclusion of meat from that area could not be justified on biological grounds. Argentina, already embittered by our tariff increases of 1922 and 1930 on its major export products, beef, wool and mutton, hides and tallow, wheat, corn and flaxseed, protested, but without avail. The Roosevelt administration, in line with its Good Neighbor policy, negotiated a Sanitary Convention which would have replaced the 1930 legislation with a policy defensible on biological grounds. But the same pressure groups which were responsible for the embargo have been successful in preventing ratification of the Convention. The repercussions on Argentine-American relations are unfortunate, to say the least. Argentina has instituted an exchange control that discriminates against American exporters, and its attitude in Pan American affairs is somewhat a matter of concern to our State Department.