Liza Piper. "Parasites from 'Alien Shores': The Decline of Canada's Freshwater Fishing Industry." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 87-114.
Ah, the sweet smell of a manufactured trade-related public health controversy. Such things are very familiar to us today, of course. In this article, however, Liza Piper examines a similar dispute which occurred during the 1930s, when American freshwater fishing corporations successfully lobbied their government to ban Canadian exports of tullibee and whitefish on the grounds that they contained a (harmless to humans) parasite, Triaenophorus.
The parasite had actually been around for some time, Piper observes -- and, while humans ate infected fish, it didn't actually cause diseases in humans. It was, however, largely confined to Canadian lakes -- and it was easier to find in border inspections than in the supermarket. This meant it was a convenient method for barring Canadian exporters from competing with American companies.
So much for the trade embargo side. What Piper does best -- even if at times the paper seems to wander a bit -- is observe the implications and complications of this. Government policy bodies and scientific research projects sprang up targeting Triaenophorus, for no particular reason other than the trade dispute. Triaenophorus, meanwhile, prospered indeed, now that fishers were no longer targeting some of its most important host species.
It's easy to take from this that the growth of Triaenophorus was a negative unintended consequence of the attempt to suppress it. I'm not sure whether Piper is trying to make this argument in her conclusion or not. I hope not. That's because if the Americans never really genuinely cared about Triaenophorus to begin with, except as a useful lever on trade policy, then the growth of Triaenophorus would have helped them even more.
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