Officials Plan to Lift Quarantine on County Fruit : Medflies: The biological war, which enraged some residents, cost local growers an estimated $50 million. Restrictions may be removed Tuesday.

Ten months after two Mediterranean fruit flies were found in a Camarillo fig tree, state and federal officials are preparing to lift the quarantine on local fruit--ending an expensive biological war that cost local growers an estimated $50 million and enraged area residents opposed to aerial pesticide sprayings.

But the effects of this war are not over. Some Ventura County growers--who have been waiting for the quarantine’s end to harvest fruit--may flood the market with produce, thus depressing prices.

The spraying also killed insects considered beneficial to farmers and may have left the area open to infestation by other harmful bugs.

Tuesday, pending the signature of key agriculture officials, the restrictions will be lifted. First imposed Oct. 5 on an 86-square-mile swath of the county, the quarantine forced farmers inside the boundaries to fumigate their produce and closed markets to them for months.

“We realize this treatment has been an inconvenience to the public and the growers,” said Doug Hendrix, a media officer with the Cooperative Medfly Project in Los Angeles. “We’re just as happy to be finishing and getting out of everyone’s way.”

The growers are happy too.

For certain fruits--including Ventura County staples such as oranges, lemons and avocados--ranchers faced new procedures to follow before they could ship fruit from the affected area. They also faced the loss of business from foreign countries--most notably Japan--that would not buy fruit from the quarantined area.

For Mission Produce, which has avocado growers throughout the county and state, the quarantine meant separating fruit raised inside and outside the quarantine area, Operations Manager Bob Tobias said. It also meant fumigating the fruit grown within the affected area, a procedure that cost about 4 or 5 cents per pound, he said.

Since the company’s growers harvested about 2.5 million pounds of fruit under the quarantine, the fumigation costs alone total at least $100,000, Tobias said. And that does not include the price of pesticide spraying, separate from the Medfly project’s aerial runs.

Tobias said he did not know how much the quarantine’s final cost to his company would be. “We may try to figure that out at some point in time,” he said, “but we really had to hit the bricks running. We just had to do what we had to do.”

Growers with Pro-Ag had been applying a pesticide to their lemons and avocados until recently, said Don Reeder, a manager with the Moorpark-based company. The pesticide, however, causes the fruit to mature quickly, raising the risk that it may decay during shipment. So the company has been holding off on harvesting until the quarantine is lifted Tuesday.

“I will be very upset if it doesn’t go that day, because we have a lot of harvesting planned,” he said.

The prospect that many growers may have the same idea raises some concern that a sudden glut of fruit on the market could drive down prices. But Reeder said he won’t panic over the possibility.

“If the market disappears, I’ll pull out and hold off,” he said.

Another of the quarantine’s effects may take longer to show. The pesticides used to combat fruit flies also may have severely damaged insects that farmers rely on to kill other bugs, said Carolyn D. Leavens, past president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn. and a partner in her family’s avocado and citrus ranches.

“It’s going to take awhile to get that balance re-established,” she said.

The danger is that other pests could seize this opportunity to attack crops. “You know you’re going to have a pest bloom after this thing,” she said. “Nature hates a vacuum, and if you don’t get these beneficial insects back in there, the pests are just going to march back in.”

Parts of the county already face problems with a mite that lays eggs on leaves, eventually causing the leaves to fall off, Tobias said.

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What brought the Medfly to Ventura County remains unclear.

The two female flies discovered on Sept. 29 could have arrived in the county by mail or by hitching a ride on some vehicle, according to agricultural experts.

Rex Laird, executive director of the county’s farm bureau, said outbreaks often begin with fruit that has been shipped from countries infested with the flies. Individuals ask friends or family members in those countries to send the fruit, not realizing the potential damage.

“It’s a pest that is brought in by people who are, one, careless, or two, cavalier,” he said. “They bring fruit in from the mail, they open it up and find maggots, and they throw it in the trash.”

The tiny pests, capable of reducing valuable crops to mush, have not been found in the Camarillo fig tree since late September. Nor have they appeared in any of the more than 2,500 fruit fly traps in the area since Nov. 21.

Within days of the discovery of the first flies, the Cooperative Medfly Project organized a vigorous regimen of aerial spraying for a 16-square-mile area near Camarillo. Every other week, helicopters would fly out to disperse the pesticide malathion on the fields and residences nearby.

The effort drew criticism from some residents opposed to aerial spraying. Some staged protests during the spraying runs, including the last helicopter flight May 23.

Leonard Mehlmauer, a holistic health practitioner based in Camarillo, said malathion’s long-term effects on humans is unknown.

Rather than impose a spraying program, he said, the project should have used a combination of integrated pest management--using some insects to fight others--and selective pesticide application.

“Instead of just hammering people and the insects with a poisonous substance, you carefully consider the environment, including the people, and then you proceed,” he said.

The Medfly project is now using a kind of pest management against the pest in the Los Angeles area. Each week, 430 million sterilized flies are released into the area in an attempt to breed the wild flies out of existence, Hendrix said. The program is expect to run through March.

Had a similar program been tried in Ventura County, Hendrix said, the quarantine would have lasted two years.