A crisis has been gripping the American beef industry for two years now, although for the most part it seems to have escaped much notice among average people — other than that they have seen the price of beef rise in their neighborhood grocery stores.

But this crisis — the closing of the U.S. border with Canada to live cattle imports — has begun to cost important jobs in many small towns, including one in Utah. It also is rapidly reaching the point where it could cause permanent harm to beef processors. The jobs that are disappearing may never come back.

That's big news in towns like Hyrum, where the EA Miller meat packing plant, long a staple of the local economy, has had to lay off 66 workers and cut back production by 20 percent. That's because the plant relied on Canadian cattle for a sizable portion of its business. It's big news, too, in similar towns nationwide. Nebraska's governor recently said his state has lost 8,100 jobs due to the border closure.

The issue is mad cow disease — the unfortunate popular term for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. Two years ago, the disease was found for the first time in a cow in Canada, which prompted the government to close the border. Since then, officials on both sides of the border have worked to restore public confidence, although two more cases have been discovered in Canada. In none of the cases, however, have the infected cattle entered the food supply. Canada's procedures for inspecting cattle are virtually the same as those in the United States, with the exception that Canada can trace the history of every animal, and the United States can't.

The federal government was about to reopen the border when a lawsuit by a Montana-based organization of cattlemen got in the way.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis has proven good for the people who raise and sell cattle, because the price of beef has risen, and bad for virtually everyone else. That prompted Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to travel to Hyrum last month for a nationwide press conference calling attention to the problem.

We agree with cattlemen that it is absolutely vital for consumers to have full confidence in the beef that enters the market. But the continued border closure is ridiculous for a couple of reasons.

First, it has not prevented Canada from exporting large quantities of boxed beef into the United States. Surely, if there is a health concern, that would extend to all beef that crosses the border, whether it is boxed or live.

Second, the border closure is counter to U.S. economic interests. Canada has never had much of a beef-processing industry, but it has been forced to develop one now that cattle can't be sent to U.S. slaughterhouses. In his Utah press conference, Johanns said the inventory of Canadian cattle has increased by more than 2 million head over the past two years and that the number of cattle slaughtered north of the border rose by 24 percent last year alone.