611.3556/119
The Acting Attorney General (Biggs) to the Secretary of Agriculture (Wallace)52
Sir: I have the honor to refer to your letter of July 7, 1933,53 requesting my opinion concerning the proper interpretation of Section 306 (a) of the Tariff Act of 1930 (c. 497,46 Stat. 590,689), prohibiting the importation of meat and live stock from foreign countries in which rinderpest or foot-and-mouth disease has been determined to exist.
Section 306 (a) reads as follows:
“Rinderpest And Foot-and-Mouth Disease.—If the Secretary of Agriculture determines that rinderpest for [or] foot-and-mouth disease exists in any foreign country, he shall officially notify the Secretary of the Treasury and give public notice thereof, and thereafter, and until the Secretary of Agriculture gives notice in a similar manner that such disease no longer exists in such foreign country, the importation into the United States of cattle, sheep, or other domestic ruminants, or swine, or of fresh, chilled, or frozen beef, veal, mutton, lamb, or pork, from such foreign country, is prohibited.”
Acting under this statute, the Secretary of Agriculture has previously determined that the disease mentioned exists in the Republic of Argentina and has given the prescribed notices. You state, however, that the disease does not exist in all portions of Argentina and suggest that the purpose of the statute might be accomplished by confining its inhibition upon importations to those portions of Argentina in which the disease actually exists. The Secretary of State, in a letter to me under date of July 27th, sets forth representations made to his Department that the disease does not exist in the southern portion of Argentina, known as Patagonia, and that “Patagonia is, geographically considered, isolated from the remainder of Argentina owing to the extreme scarcity of means of communication.”
Observing the common import of the words of the statute, when the disease has been determined to exist “in any foreign country” all importations of the prescribed commodities from such foreign country are prohibited, without exception. I perceive in this no ambiguity or absurdity of result which would warrant our going beyond the statute itself to seek the intention of Congress, but it is apparent from the opinion of your Solicitor that such a resort to the authorized sources of assistance in solving ambiguities would lead to the conclusion that Congress did in fact intend to prohibit all importations of the specified commodities from a foreign country in which the disease exists regardless of the fact that the disease may or may not be confined to particular [Page 785] areas in such country; and the statute has been so administered since its enactment.
The Republic of Argentina, of course, is a foreign country, and no reasons have been presented to me which, in my opinion, would justify a conclusion that the southern part, referred to as Patagonia, may be considered a separate country. It appears from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and from Nelson’s Perpetual Loose Leaf Encyclopaedia (corrected to 1933) that “Patagonia” is a name commonly applied to the southern part of South America, embracing territory within both Chile and Argentina, and it further appears that the Patagonian portion of Argentina is geographically contiguous to the remainder of Argentina, the whole constituting a single political entity, one country, the Republic of Argentina.
It is therefore my opinion that importations of the commodities described in Section 306 (a) of the Tariff Act of 1930 from any part of the Republic of Argentina are prohibited so long as rinderpest or foot-and-mouth disease exists in that country, as determined by the Secretary of Agriculture.
Respectfully,