Health Scare Puts Mexico’s Strawberry Harvest on Hold

Mexican strawberry growers are suspending their harvests and laying off thousands of workers as sales plummet due to a U.S. hepatitis scare linked to Mexican berries, growers and officials said Tuesday.

The Mexicans continued to insist that the hepatitis A virus that recently sickened more than 160 students and adults in Michigan and panicked thousands of parents did not originate south of the border. Instead, they say, the strawberries must have been contaminated when they were stored and processed in San Diego.

However, Mexico’s $44-million strawberry export industry may be crippled for months because of the publicity surrounding the incident. Supermarkets in the U.S. and Mexico alike have canceled purchases of Mexican strawberries.

Angry Mexican farmers, already suspicious of U.S. policies that they believe are intended to protect American growers from competition, even suggested a deliberate U.S. attempt to blame Mexican agriculture for the hepatitis in a bid to damage sales of Mexican berries.

“We do not rule out that this is an act of sabotage to remove us from the market, an unfair trade practice,” strawberry growers from Baja California declared in a letter to President Ernesto Zedillo reprinted in newspapers Tuesday.

The letter offered no evidence and didn’t say who might be behind any “sabotage” against the Mexican crops.

A spokesman for Mexico’s Agriculture Ministry, Francisco de la Sota, said officials were consulting with farmers on the problem. There was no comment from Zedillo’s office on the allegations or pleas for help.

The bad berries are blamed for an outbreak of hepatitis last month among Michigan schoolchildren who ate frozen fruit desserts. The strawberries originated in Mexico but were processed and frozen in a San Diego facility.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration are still trying to determine where the contamination occurred. Mexican growers and officials say that if their berries carried diseases, they would have been detected by U.S. food inspectors at the border, as well as by local consumers. In fact, there has been no hepatitis outbreak in Mexico linked to the fruit.

Meanwhile, thousands of children in California and other states who also ate the berries have been getting inoculations against the illness, a liver infection that can cause flu-like symptoms.

And at least some consumers in California quit buying any strawberries just to be safe. State growers, who produce 80% of the nation’s strawberries, and supermarkets reported softening of demand that dropped prices to $5 per tray, or 12 pints, versus the $6 to $7 that prevailed before the hepatitis news broke. But there was no collapse of the market.

In Baja California, however, where the strawberries came from, fruit farmers are in crisis. Roughly 90% of the region’s strawberries are exported, but since Friday, no one has been buying.

“We have had to suspend the harvest, leaving at least 2,500 families without work,” said the letter from the Regional Union of Produce Growers of Baja California.

About half the season’s crop is still on the vine, and growers face at least $5 million in losses, the letter said.

Arturo Elias, agricultural marketing director for Baja California, said local exporters have no options. They can’t sell their berries in the domestic market because they use expensive technology that often makes their produce too costly for Mexican consumers, he said.

“This season is lost,” he said.

Growers elsewhere in Mexico say they can’t sell their berries at home, either.

Ana Maria Laurino, a strawberry wholesaler from central Mexico, said even her Mexican clients aren’t buying the fruit because of the U.S. problem.

Normally, she said, she sells about 500 boxes of strawberries a day--roughly 5,500 pounds--to big supermarkets in Mexico including Price Club and Wal-Mart. But since last week, she said, “They haven’t asked me for even one.”

In addition to the health probe, U.S. officials are conducting a criminal investigation because the berries, sold to the federal school lunch program, apparently were fraudulently certified by the processor, Andrew & Williamson Sales Co., as having been U.S.-grown.

California strawberry growers expressed sympathy Tuesday with Mexican farmers over suspension of the harvest. But they face their own problems--slower sales of fresh strawberries and lower prices--as a result of the hepatitis crisis.

Ralphs Grocery Co. was among grocery chains that last week halted orders of berries from Mexico out of concern that consumer demand would flag.

Indeed, sales have slowed in this country, strawberry growers said Tuesday.

“We always experience a little softening after Easter,” said Scott Deardorff, an owner of Deardorff-Jackson Co., an Oxnard grower. “This has compounded that.”

But Teresa Thorne, a spokeswoman for the California Strawberry Commission in Watsonville, said markets have “rebounded somewhat” from last week.

Sheridan reported from Mexico City and Groves from Los Angeles.