U.S. Ban Spoils Guatemala’s Berry Reforms

After investing tens of thousands of dollars in wells, flush toilets, sinks, disposable rubber gloves and retraining, Guatemalan raspberry growers were left puzzled and indignant last week by the U.S. government ban on imports of their 1998 spring crop.

“The news hit us like a bucket of cold water,” said Roberto Castaneda, president of the Guatemalan berry growers association. “We feel as if we are being made the first example.”

Because of their efforts, the Guatemalans had expected to be a far different kind of example: a model of how a developing country can successfully work to meet the sanitary standards of a First World market.

They were particularly stung because they had volunteered to keep their 1998 spring harvest off American supermarket shelves--and had also refrained from shipping the 1997 spring crop--until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration pinpointed what caused outbreaks this year of cyclosporiasis, an illness with symptoms that range from diarrhea to severe vomiting.

“This does tremendous harm to our image,” Isabel Prieto, assistant to the Guatemalan agriculture minister, said of the ban.

The ban on Guatemalan raspberries was announced amid what one U.S. source called “enormous pressure” on the FDA to protect the American food supply from contamination, especially illnesses imported along with foreign-grown fruits and vegetables.

Unlike Mexico and Chile, the other two major Latin American fruit suppliers for the United States, Guatemala does not have a significant lobby in Washington, Castaneda said.

“Seasonally, up to 70% of the selected fruits and vegetables consumed in this country come from developing countries,” noted a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. “One does not need to leave home to contract traveler’s diarrhea.”

The editorial accompanied a research article that linked Guatemalan raspberries to about 1,400 cases of cyclosporiasis that occurred in the United States and Canada in 1996.

That year, Guatemala exported $22 million worth of raspberries to the United States, supplying nearly 40% of the foreign-grown raspberries eaten by Americans. In the decade since the first bushes were planted here, the crop has become a significant export product, providing 5,500 jobs, mainly in rural areas where work is scarce.

“Raspberries are important because they are a nontraditional export that is growing,” said Eduardo Spirisen, vice minister of economics. In recent years, Guatemala has attempted to diversify its economy away from dependence on coffee, bananas and cattle ranching.

Trying to protect their success in the raspberry market, Guatemalans have cooperated with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to find and eliminate the source of cyclosporiasis.

Farms such as Castaneda’s 50-acre El Injerto (The Grafting), in the hills above the colonial city of Antigua, have installed sinks with liquid soap and paper towels in the middle of berry fields. The washing stands are part of a 16-point checklist to prevent the spread of disease. The list also included drilling new wells and revamping irrigation systems to eliminate polluted water.

Castaneda, a Texas A&M; graduate, estimates that the sanitary measures have increased his costs between 10% and 15%. About 40% of Guatemala’s 427 raspberry producers--mostly small growers--could not afford to make such changes. Guatemalan authorities now forbid them to export fresh berries.

Even growers who made improvements kept their 1997 spring crop off the U.S. market voluntarily, a decision that cost them $12 million in exports, according to Castaneda. Spring is part of the rainy season in Guatemala. American disease experts suspect--but are not sure--that the spread of cyclosporiasis may be linked to water.

The Guatemalans resumed exporting when the rains stopped in October. No cases of the disease have been tied to autumn exports.

Despite those efforts, 19 outbreaks of the illness occurred in the U.S. last spring--about one-third the number reported in 1996. The source of the 1997 outbreaks has not yet been determined.

“It could be some other produce,” Spirisen said. “The source of the disease has still not been scientifically established.”

Part of the problem in determining the source of contamination and preventing it is that no reliable test exists to detect in fruit the parasite that causes the disease, according to public health experts. The parasite shows up only in the feces of victims.

Thus, the study of the 1996 outbreaks relied on tracing the cases through the victims’ diets and concluded that the illness was related to raspberries from five Guatemalan farms.

“That is evidence that berry growers and vice ministers may not be comfortable with, but from a public health viewpoint, it is overwhelming,” said one source familiar with the study.

While Guatemalan officials are hopeful they may be able to convince the FDA to lift the ban after agency officials visit in January and the study of 1997 cases is completed, growers such as Castaneda are considering other options.

He has pulled out one-third of his raspberry bushes and plans to replace them with blueberries--a less profitable crop, but one that has not been implicated in the illness.