U.S. Rejects State Produce Restrictions
Florida’s petition to restrict California produce was shot down Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which said that California’s efforts to contain the Medfly are ensuring the purity of state-grown fruits and vegetables.
Florida’s petition could be reconsidered within 30 days. But barring a major new outbreak of the Mediterranean fruit fly in California, the federal government will “leave things the way they are now, because California is beating the Medfly,” a spokesman for the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said.
In rejecting Florida’s petition to have all California produce be inspected and certified free of Medfly larvae, the Department of Agriculture noted that no Medfly has been caught since May 1 in any of California’s more than 35,000 traps deployed in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
The policies outlined in Florida’s petition, if ordered by the Department of Agriculture, would have profoundly wounded California’s multibillion-dollar farm economy, much of which lies outside the areas where Medflies have been caught. In addition to asking special inspection and certification, Florida agriculture officials had asked the federal government to make California enact tougher and broader Medfly eradication efforts--to deploy more traps statewide and spray malathion more often and over a wider area.
Florida, which is California’s main rival in citrus and other Sun Belt crops, has suffered from its own Medfly epidemic this year, and links its recurrent pest problems to the import of California produce.
The crop-consuming insect attacked both California and Florida farms in 1981, appearing first in California. Florida and four other states then tried to bar California produce, but California successfully sued to overturn Florida’s attempted quarantine.
Last Friday, Doyle Conner, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture, argued in announcing the petition that Californian Medflies are “widely distributed” and present “a very real and serious threat of being moved to Florida and other Southern states by way of infested host fruits and vegetables.”
“Therefore,” Conner said, “strict and encompassing quarantine regulations must be imposed in California to protect other areas of the United States.”
Florida officials maintain that the California Department of Food and Agriculture deploys too few Medfly traps to know the magnitude of the problem.
Since Jan. 26, when the first of 19 Medflies was caught in Southern California, the state has installed about 30 traps per square mile within the federally declared Medfly quarantine area, which embraces about 1,300 square miles of the Los Angeles Basin. But in the rest of the state--where no Medflies have been caught--the department places five traps per square mile in urban areas and one trap per square mile in harvest areas.
Agriculture officials in Florida’s Dade County, responding to the capture of 23 Medflies in a 15-square-mile area there in recent months, have mounted a strong anti-Medfly campaign involving the placement of 10 traps per square mile and spraying malathion three to four times in threatened areas before introducing sterile male Medflies.
Connie Hiherd, assistant director of the Florida Department of Agriculture’s division of plant industry, said the California Department of Food and Agriculture should do the same. She criticized the California eradication effort for taking “shortcuts,” such as spraying areas only once or twice.
“Their detection efforts are not adequate. The program there is not following the advice of its advisers,” Hiherd said.
But a group of high-ranking state agriculture officials on the National Plant Board Advisory Council were not persuaded by the appeal from the Florida representative. Members representing California, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Alabama and Oregon were involved.
“Florida was the only state within the panel making a strong pitch for the petition,” said Isi Siddiqui, assistant director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the state’s representative to the advisory council.
Siddiqui said Florida’s proposal would have cost California taxpayers “hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary measures to regulate millions of tons of fruit.”
Florida agriculture officials vowed to push again for the measure, particularly if more Medflies turn up next month in California traps.
