Postal Officials Urged to Bolster Medfly Efforts

New regulations designed to prevent the spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly through the mails are scheduled to take effect next week, but California agriculture officials are already complaining they do not go far enough.

“These regulations adopted by the U.S. Postal Service are not going to address the problem of contraband in first class mail,” said Isi Siddiqui, assistant director of the division of plant industry for the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Siddiqui said state officials would like to see federal postal authorities pursue illegal fruit that could contain agricultural pests as aggressively as they are pursuing narcotics--even using fruit-sniffing dogs, if that is what the effort takes.

But postal officials said it may not be easy--even for a trained dog--to tell the difference between a package containing illegal fruit and one containing legal fruit.

Responding to legislation passed by Congress last year, the Postal Service drafted toughened regulations set to take effect Wednesday that are supposed to make it harder to spread pests through the mails. The regulations make it a crime to knowingly mail pest-infested fruit.

Those battling the Medfly infestation--which covers 277 square miles of Southern California--argue that one way the insects spread is through fruit and vegetables mailed from already-infested areas, such as Hawaii, to California.

Siddiqui said that in the first six months of this year alone, Orange County postal authorities uncovered fruit infested with the Oriental fruit fly on four occasions. The Oriental fruit fly is a less-destructive pest than the Medfly, which can eat more than 200 different kinds of fruits and vegetables grown in California. Those packages of fruit were discovered only because they were leaking and required repackaging.

But according to John Ventresco, an attorney for the Postal Service in Washington, Congress did not address the issue of determining how one establishes probable cause to open a package. After all, he said, the privacy of the mails is protected by the 4th Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

To open suspect mail, Ventresco said, inspectors would have to show evidence that it likely contains contraband--in this case illegal fruit.

“It’s difficult to say there is enough evidence to establish probable cause that a certain package contains non-mailable plant material, as opposed to mailable plant material,” Ventresco said.

Non-mailable plants are fruits and vegetables from a quarantined area that might serve as hosts for pests such as the Medfly. Such hosts are guavas, mangoes, papayas and other exotic fruit from Hawaii, where Medflies are permanent residents.

“It’s one thing to say a package contains marijuana that can be detected by a dog,” Ventresco said. “But they haven’t demonstrated that capability with mailable and non-mailable fruit.”

Siddiqui acknowledged the difficulty in determining such a difference.

But he said agriculture officials “have an extremely high level of confidence that dogs can be trained to sniff fruit and do a good job.”

He said some dogs are already on duty at international airports, sniffing baggage for meat and other organic materials, including vegetables. Still, when it comes to telling the difference between one class of fruit and another, the challenge is tougher, he agreed.

On Oct. 4, state agriculture officials asked that postal authorities draft a “profile” description of a typical suspicious package. When a package came through the post office that fit the profile, agriculture officials hoped that authorities would then obtain a search warrant to open it.

But on Dec. 4, the Postal Service published its final rules in the Federal Register without drafting the requested profile. The Federal Register notice said postal authorities did not believe the profile could “appropriately be added to these regulations.”

Ventresco said he did not think profiling would be an effective solution.

Agricultural authorities said attempts will be made at high levels in Washington in the next few weeks to persuade the Postal Service to take what state officials consider to be a more aggressive posture in the battle against the Medfly.