In years to come, the BSE crisis in which Britain is now engulfed may become a textbook case of how economic shortsightedness coupled with political arrogance and soundbite news management can produce consequences of literally unassessable dimensions. No other country has been afflicted by madcow disease as Britain has because none has taken the risks Britain did - in the name of efficient modern farming, cheap food and maximised profits.
This State, France and others took no chances, but stamped hard on the handful of cases as they occurred. In Britain, a minister of agriculture took up airspace and newspaper columns to be pictured feeding his children hamburgers made of British beef. What is trivialised often comes back to haunt us.
When the dust settles, perhaps the gurus who guided British agriculture into the current fiasco will take the time to rethink the distinctiveness - and the dangers - of what they have created. Irish farmers will have deep sympathy for their thousands of colleagues across the Irish Sea who stand on the brink of losing their stock and in the meantime have lost their markets. They will have none for the architects of a policy which has damaged the reputation of European beef as a whole.
Last night's decision by the European Commission to ban British beef exports to other memberstates indefinitely is a draconian step, but a necessary one "to ring fence the problem", in the Minister for Agriculture's words. Mr Yates expects today to formalise the ban as far as this State is concerned, and then begin the task of convincing our export customers that they have nothing to fear from our beef products and live cattle. British objections to the ban are understandable, and there has been pressure to reconsider it. Some room may exist for adjustment, but clearly the general consumer interest must be dominant.
Since beef exports are worth £2 billion to our economy, the drain of confidence reflected in Egypt's and Libya's refusal to accept beef or cattle from any of the EU's 15 members has frightening implications. But the whole crisis has demonstrated how big a part public perceptions play in economic affairs. Neither the long known lethal effects of tobacco nor the suspected connection between aluminium and Alzheimer's Disease have had such an immediate impact as the fear of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease; partly, no doubt, because the CJD threat is unquantifiable and not yet properly understood. But it also contains a warning about the instability of demand for beef, for dietary and other reasons. The trend may be difficult to reverse.
There will be immediate benefits for non British suppliers of milk and meat if and when the mass slaughter of British cattle is decreed how much and for how long will depend on the extent and nature of the culling. On the downside is the huge uncertainty introduced into the economic equation. The ban on British beef derivatives will have wide effects in industry; British farmers are already suffering from the disruption of marts and production patterns. But all of this will pale to insignificance if a major proportion, or all, of the British national herd has to be destroyed. The cost of compensation, and the slow restoration of normality, will have political consequences for the whole of the EU even though they flow from miscalculations by a succession of British governments.
There are ironies not unnaturally, Northern farmers want to be recategorised as Irish, and Euro sceptics in Britain may be most vociferous in demanding help from Brussels. These serve to show how, in a complex world, none of us can claim to be an island.