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JUNE 23, 16:53
EST
Farmers,
USDA Deal With Plant Disease
By ROXANA
HEGEMAN
Associated Press Writer
ANTHONY, Kan. (AP) — Bureaucratic bungling by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture has allowed the spread of a plant
disease that could prove as devastating to wheat exports as
foot-and-mouth disease has been to livestock, farm groups
said.
Wheat growers in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas say the USDA
responded too slowly to an outbreak of Karnal bunt at the
southernmost edge of the nation's wheat belt just as harvest
was getting underway.
Karnal bunt is a fungus that is harmless to people but
sours the taste and smell of flour made from infected kernels.
It also slightly cuts production in infected fields.
The disease's main impact is economic: 80 countries ban
imports of wheat grown in infected regions.
That could be as crippling for American growers, who last
year produced nearly $6 billion of wheat, as would be the
discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in U.S. livestock, said
Brett Myers, executive vice president for the Kansas Wheat
Growers Association.
Europe's foot-and-mouth outbreak has cost millions of
dollars for the slaughter of some 3 million animals and a ban
on exports.
The suspected Karnal bunt contamination was first reported
to the USDA on May 25, said Michael Bryant, co-owner of the
elevator in Olney, Texas, that found it.
``Our hearts were sinking down in our stomach wondering
what to do — we chose to do the right thing,'' Bryant said.
But it took seven days before the USDA's Animal and Plant
Inspection Service confirmed the finding, and 15 days before
it quarantined the first affected counties.
``Their reaction to the situation was not as timely as we
would have liked,'' Kansas Agriculture Secretary Jamie Clover
Adams said.
Charles Schwalbe, director of APHIS' plant protection and
quarantine program, said his agency sent the sample away for
testing at a national lab instead of using a local one to make
sure it had accurate and legally defensible information before
taking action.
``The decisions that emerge ... mean livelihood to people
from time to time,'' Schwalbe said.
The Karnal bunt found in Throckmorton and Young counties in
Texas were the first confirmed cases in the nation's wheat
belt, an area extending from central Texas to Alberta, Canada.
On June 19, concern widened as the USDA added neighboring
Archer County to the quarantined area, followed by Baylor
County the next day. One elevator has also been quarantined in
Fort Worth, about 150 miles southeast.
Karnal bunt, which originated in India, was first detected
in the United States in 1996 in Arizona and California. It has
since spread to southern Texas and New Mexico.
In Arizona, the amount of land used to grow wheat dropped
almost 50 percent after a quarantine was imposed in 1996 in
four counties, according to the Arizona Agricultural
Statistics Service.
But Arizona is a minor durum wheat producer, and U.S. wheat
growers have reassured overseas buyers that the disease was
far from the nation's major winter wheat producing region.
Winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in
spring, accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. wheat and is
used primarily for bread. Durum wheat is used for pasta.
With half the winter wheat going to the export market, the
discovery of the disease at the southernmost edge of the
nation's breadbasket just as the wheat harvest was moving
north sent shock waves through the wheat belt.
State regulators feared custom harvesters — cutters who
follow the ripening wheat harvest from Texas to the Canadian
border — would spread the fungus.
Oklahoma, just 50 miles from the two Texas counties where
the disease was first discovered, immediately closed its
borders and ordered combines coming into the state to be
blocked and inspected. Harvesters from infected areas without
a USDA certification of cleanliness were turned back.
And fear spread north to Kansas, the nation's biggest wheat
producer with a $1 billion wheat crop and nearly 10 million
planted acres each year
``We need to preserve our heritage and our wheat industry.
The spread of Karnal bunt in Texas should be considered a
threat to Kansas wheat,'' Kansas Gov. Bill Graves said.
Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., has been pursuing the issue
following a request from growers for a Congressional
investigation into the USDA's handling. His office said he has
not decided whether to ask for an inquiry.
Among those wanting answers are custom harvester Darryl
Emerson, who had finished loading his last truckloads of wheat
in Texas when the USDA quarantined the county where he was
cutting.
Emerson, of Cavalier, N.D., said he would never have gone
to Texas had he known an elevator had first reported Karnal
bunt in the area two weeks earlier.
It took him three days to disinfect his combine, trucks and
other harvesting equipment. He called the farm where he had
his next cutting job and was told to stay away.
``I was really counting on it — it was a pretty nice
job,'' he said.
Bryant said his elevator has already lost $200,000 for the
infected wheat and at least another $200,000 in cleaning costs
and lost business.
If he had it to do over again, Bryant said he would keep
quiet about the Karnal bunt and blend the contaminated wheat
with the rest of the crop until it could not be detected.
``I encourage any elevator operator in the country — if
this is the way it is going to be handled — to do the same
thing,'' he said.
———
On the Net:
U.S. Department of Agriculture: http://www.usda.gov/usda.htm
Kansas Wheat Growers Association: http://www.wheatonline.com/
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