If certain EU bureaucrats are right Americans who eat hamburgers will soon be dropping dead in the streets by the thousands. In fact, this forthcoming catastrophe - which by some mystery has so far eluded the American news media - forms the basis of the EU's trade policy. Surprisingly these poor, deluded freedom-loving burger-chomping Americans remain largely still alive.

The world of trade policy has some delightful examples of both lunacy and chicanery. But the case of the EU ban on imports of American beef is one of the more entertaining episodes. More to the point, what began with hamburgers has now turned into an attack on the game of cricket.

American farmers use growth hormones for raising cattle. This sounds unpleasant, but it helps the cattle grow faster and the farmers make more money that way. European (mainly French) farmers, looking for an excuse to keep US beef out of their supermarkets, came up with the notion that growth hormones used in beef cattle are harmful to humans. The Eurocrats in Brussels quickly obliged with a ban on US beef. We Continentals will die if we eat this poison, they declared.

The US Government challenged the scientific grounds for the ban in the World Trade Organisation and won hands down. Brussels, as usual, looked a fool. But did the EU comply with the WTO order to admit US beef to its markets? Not a bit. To this day the ban remains on foot.

If the Brussels bureaucrats are right, the customers of McDonalds, Burger King, and Tony Roma's Steakhouse should by now be long dead and buried, slaughtered by the growth hormones used by all those evil American farmers and their co-conspirators in the US Department of Agriculture.

The really shocking thing is that Americans continue to patronise these killer restaurants. Suicide bombers in Iraq or Pakistan? Hey, come see the millions of suicide eaters in the United States! Or so the EU would have us believe.

The latest purported use of science in trade policy from Brussels is an attack on the game of cricket. The Daily Telegraph reports that the European Commission has issued an order banning the export of English willow, which as we know is the glorious substance used to make cricket bats.

Why the ban? Because the gas methyl bromide is used to fumigate the willow to kill off any insects before it's exported to India, Australia, and elsewhere either for mass manufacture of bats (India) or for custom-made bats by the world's few remaining podshavers (see this column last month). Use of methyl bromide is forbidden under - you guessed it - a treaty! Apparently the Montreal Protocol, designed to protect the ozone layer, is a treaty deserving respect, but not the WTO Agreement.

Now Brussels never does anything for the stated reasons. Chicanery is the DNA of the Commission and its cunning officials. The question is why attack cricket bat making?

If methyl bromide must be phased out and replaced with phosphane gas, then why not just order that phosphane be used instead of methyl bromide? Oh, no. That would be too easy. If there's the slightest chance to injure trade and commerce somewhere Brussels will do so. It has to lapse into a trade ban. And what better victim to choose than cricket, the blessed occupation of the ancient enemy England and the new threat to European sloth, India.

If China begins playing cricket in a serious way what will Brussels do, ban the export of stumps and bails?

Cricket is a gift from Heaven. We must act to protect it when our foes attack.