Medfly Ban Is Grounds for Concern : Agriculture: Worried that it could be a sticky problem, fruit growers and packers are girding themselves to cope with the state’s latest expansion of the quarantine area in the county.

Fruit growers and packers say they are concerned but not alarmed by the state’s recent expansion of the war against the Mediterranean fruit fly over a large portion of Orange County.

“It makes it very difficult for us,” said Keith French, sales manager for Villa Park Orchards, a fruit packinghouse in Orange.

State officials recently expanded Orange County’s Medfly quarantine area to include about 61 square miles in and around the cities of Anaheim and Orange. Another 113 square miles in Santa Ana and Westminster have been under quarantine since August. The latest expansion was ordered earlier this month after state agricultural officials found 10 dead Medflies in traps in Anaheim and another six in Orange.

Native to the countries near the Mediterranean Sea, the Medfly lays its eggs under the skins of certain fruits, where they eventually hatch into maggots.

If allowed to flourish in California, according to Carl DeWing, a spokesman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture, the flies could wreak havoc with the state’s agricultural industry.

“It’s an exotic pest,” DeWing said. “We want to keep them from becoming established in California.”

The recent expansion of the quarantine area brought to 12 the number of Orange County cities affected by the Medfly ban. In addition to the cities in which the flies were found, other affected cities are Garden Grove, Costa Mesa, Cypress, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Stanton and Tustin.

Under quarantine rules, residents are not allowed to take any back-yard fruit off their property unless it is cooked and canned. If they need to discard it, the fruit must be double-bagged and left by the curb to be buried by sanitation workers. Street vendors who sell fruit must keep it covered with plastic. And growers wishing to ship fruit out of the infested area must comply with strict state regulations requiring it to be sprayed with pesticides and carefully inspected before shipment.

“We are in the process of signing compliance agreements with the growers now,” DeWing said.

Immediately after expanding the quarantine area, DeWing said, state workers sprayed the areas in which the flies were found with malathion. Then they released a million sterile fruit flies per square mile of affected area, a process they intend to repeat weekly for as long as the quarantine lasts.

The idea, DeWing said, is to get the flies to mate with the sterile ones, thus curbing their reproduction.

While past infestations--most recently one four years ago in Los Angeles County--have necessitated aerial spraying with malathion, he said, current plans do not call for such spraying in Orange County. Bolstered by two new facilities in Hawaii that breed a combined total of 650 million sterile fruit flies a week, DeWing said, state officials hope to solve the problem by introducing some of those flies.

“With what we have in Orange County now,” he said, “it’s unlikely we’ll go to aerial spraying. But should flies start popping up outside the (already infested) area, then aerial spraying is an option we will have to consider.”

Area fruit growers and packers, meanwhile, are girding themselves to cope with the quarantine, which could last as long as a year. While 13 growers were in the older quarantine area established last summer, the latest expansion has increased the number to 23.

“We’re a little bit afraid of what’s going to happen,” said Alan Reynolds, general manager of Treasure Farms in Tustin, which has one orchard in the affected area.

“We’ve had to set up an area where we can fumigate,” he said. “Before we can harvest we have to spray repeatedly with malathion. At this point it isn’t significant because it’s just one orchard, but if it expands any more we could be significantly impacted.”

Over at Villa Park Orchards, the impact already is significant, mainly because one of the company’s major customers is Japan, which refuses to accept products from fly-infested areas, even when special precautions have been taken. As a result, French said, the company is losing between $1 and $2 a carton on the 300,000 cartons of fruit it normally ships to Japan each year.

“We’re coping,” French said. “I don’t think it could put us out of business, but we hope it won’t last long.”