So Canada has banned Texas cattle. The reason? A flesh-eating screwworm outbreak. One imagines the Canadian Minister of Agriculture waking up, sniffing the wind, and declaring, 'Something is rotten in the state of Texas.' And so the border clangs shut on 180,000 head of cattle. Let us pause to marvel at this: a country so vast, so empty, so brimming with moose and maple syrup, suddenly trembles at the prospect of a maggot. But the real question, the one that should keep you awake at night, is what this means for Britain. Our food security, already a frayed rope, just snapped another thread.
We live in an age of decadence. The Romans worried about barbarians at the gate. We worry about screwworms. But the worm is merely a symptom. The disease is our collective incapacity to manage risk. Canada, a nation that prides itself on reasonableness, has resorted to a medieval quarantine. Why? Because globalised agriculture has turned every disease into a potential pandemic. Your steak dinner now depends on the health of a cow in Alberta. Or Texas. Or Brazil. And when one link breaks, the whole chain rattles.
Let us examine the intellectual decadence at play. The screwworm is not new. It was eradicated from North America decades ago, thanks to sterile insect technique. But we forgot. We assumed the problem was solved forever because we are clever. We are not clever. We are merely complacent. The reappearance of the screwworm in Texas is not a natural disaster. It is a policy failure. Budget cuts to border inspections, lapses in livestock surveillance, a touch of hubris. And now thousands of cattle are trapped in a bureaucratic amber. The Canadians, to their credit, acted. Yet their action reveals a deeper truth: we are all one bad shipment away from a national food emergency.
And what of Britain? We import nearly half our food. Our domestic production is a shrinking island of green in a sea of imports. The government talks of 'food security' as if it were a box to tick. It is not. It is a web of interdependencies. If Canada can ban Texas cattle, Britain can ban Argentine beef, or New Zealand lamb, or Spanish tomatoes. And then what? We fall back on our own farmers, who are already racing toward an abyss of rising costs, labour shortages, and climate volatility. The screwworm is a metaphor. It eats not just flesh but confidence. It eats the idea that our supermarket shelves will always be full.
Consider the historical parallel. In the late Roman Empire, grain shipments from Egypt and North Africa sustained the capital. When those shipments faltered, the city starved. Britain today is Rome, and our granaries are abroad. The screwworm is not a Visigoth. It is a parasite. But parasites can topple empires if allowed to fester. The fall of Rome was not a single event. It was a thousand small failures. A neglected road. A corrupt official. A missed harvest. And now, a banned herd of Texas cattle.
The lesson is not that we should ban all imports. That is the cry of the nativist, and it is as dangerous as the worm. The lesson is that we must rebuild resilience. That means investing in domestic agriculture even when it is cheaper to import. That means stockpiling essential goods. That means treating food security as a matter of national defence, not a trading statistic. The Canadians have given us a gift: a warning. And we are likely to squander it, as we squander all warnings, by pretending this is a provincial matter. It is not. It is a mirror. In that mirror, we see our own fragility.
So let us not laugh at Canada. Let us shudder. The worm that closed the border is the same worm that will one day close our larders, unless we awaken from our slumber. The time for decadence is over. The time for vigilance has begun.
