The Ticking Guava

It’s September, and all over Asia the Festival of the Harvest Moon has cranked into gear. The crops are in, the fruit is ripe on the trees and one continuous celebration has started from the Philippines to Thailand. A happy time, a time when families get together.

Except, of course, for the cousins who now live in Canoga Park. They are missing from the Harvest Moon, a whole ocean separating them, and so an aunt or uncle packs up a few guavas for easy travel to California. A memento to show the cousins they are not forgotten. From all the countries of Asia, the guavas, the tamarinds, the papayas are coming.

The next time you hear a sortie of helicopters trundling over your roof, sprinkling malathion to beat back the latest attack of fruit flies, you might think about the Harvest Moon and those otherwise innocent packages. Because there is a connection. California, once a biological island on the land, is an island no more. And we are all paying the cost.

In the Los Angeles area alone, there have been seven outbreaks of Oriental fruit flies in the past year. That is a record. In all of California, half the fruit fly infestations in the state’s history have occurred in the last five years. This summer, you may have noticed, the helicopters were flying in the north and in the south at the same time. We are under siege.

And the main source of that siege is a matter of some delicacy. Agriculture officials are uncomfortable about fingering California’s newest wave of immigrants as the culprits in the escalation of the bug war. But there’s no escaping it. Many of those care packages coming by first-class mail from the Asian motherlands also carry some of the most destructive fruit flies on Earth.

It is illegal, of course, to send fruits and vegetables through the mails. But who knows about those laws in the dusty, small towns of the Philippines? And so they keep packing and sending, jet load after jet load.

The next few weeks will be the worst time of the year, as the harvest festivals reach their peaks. After that, there will be smaller upticks with the advent of Buddhist holidays. Some agricultural officials believe they can see a correlation between these Eastern calender events and the surges of fruit fly outbreaks here.

The stakes are considerable in this war. California agriculture produces about $16.2 billion worth of crops a year, and the vast majority are threatened by one or another of the fruit flies. If just one outbreak gets away from the state, the results would be catastrophic.

In the infamous 1980-81 outbreak of the Medfly, which came close to doing just that, the eventual costs were $200 million and most experts believe the state got off lucky. Hawaii and Florida have been less fortunate. Both those states have surrendered some crops to permanent fruit fly infestations, meaning they cannot be exported without expensive fumigation.

In the past, this kind of threat might have served as the trigger for a replay of the yellow peril business. But that has not happened, and it’s reassuring. Maybe we’ve grown beyond that. Agriculture officials have kept their response low-key in spite of a growing sense of crisis inside the agencies.

What they have done is quietly lobby for a revision in federal laws that would enlarge their powers to inspect first-class mail packages. Right now, even a package oozing juice from decaying fruit cannot be opened by inspectors because of privacy laws. If a postal worker notices oozing, he is required to reseal the package and send it along to the addressee.

And next to the drug-sniffing German shepherds at Customs, there are now beagles who sniff for fruits and vegetables. Every day they nab a few guavas nestled among the nightshirts.

They had better succeed, because the relative isolation of California, flanked by deserts on the east and the Pacific on the west, clearly will no longer serve to protect the state. And it is possible that one day a hungry bug will arrive--by jet, of course--that the plant scientists cannot stop with their sprays.

Already, in the past several years, five species of all-new fruit flies have been trapped in California. They had never been seen here or anywhere else in North America. And one fly was special indeed.

A trap inspector brought this fly to the agricultural lab in Los Angeles for identification. The entomologists looked, dissected, and were puzzled. This fly was nowhere on the charts. They concluded it was a fly that had never been categorized, perhaps had never been seen before by scientists anywhere.

They didn’t know where it came from or, more important, what it liked to eat. They still don’t.