Those Flies in Brown's Ointment

Facing a quarantine, California orders aerial spraying

God in His wisdom Made the fly And then forgot To tell us why.

--Ogden Nash Perhaps one reason was to test Jerry Brown. Last week, as swarms of voracious Mediterranean fruit flies in northern California threatened to bring a nationwide ban on shipments of fruits and vegetables from California's lush orchards and farm lands, the Democratic Governor faced one of the toughest decisions of his political career: whether to bow to California's $14 billion-a-year agriculture industry, which grows 40% of U.S. produce, or heed the angry voices of environmentalists, who have looked upon him as one of their chief political allies.

California's farmers argue that there is only one way the state can end the Medfly explosion: by bombarding infested areas from the air with a pesticide, Malathion. President Reagan's Agriculture Secretary, John Block, agrees, and his department threatened to quarantine all California produce susceptible to infestation unless aerial spraying was immediately approved. But residents of fly-plagued Santa Clara County, which includes the high-income communities of Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, have vehemently opposed that approach. Noting that Malathion is suspected by some scientists of causing cancer and birth defects, they raised protest placards at town meetings and wrote angry letters equating the spraying with the use of the defoliant Agent Orange in Southeast Asia. Said Mayor Alan Henderson of Palo Alto, one of the cities that refused to permit the spraying: "This is the strongest outpouring of feeling since the Viet Nam War."

It is also the biggest threat to California agriculture in years. A tiny pest the size of a grain of rice, the Medfly began showing up last summer in both the Los Angeles area and Santa Clara Country. No one knows where it came from --perhaps in fruit carried by a tourist returning from Hawaii. But though the flies are not indigenous to the mainland, they lay their eggs in at least 200 U.S.-grown fruits and vegetables, including such California staples as plums, peaches, apricots and nectarines. Maggots hatch from the eggs and feast away until the fruit drops to the ground. Because the fruit fly's depredations make produce virtually unsalable, and usually inedible, California quickly mobilized--spraying trees from the ground, destroying fruit and even releasing sterilized male Medflies to reduce the number of offspring.

These tactics eradicated the menace in Los Angeles, but the Medflies kept spreading in the northern part of the state.

A suit by California's attorney general to upset local bans on aerial spraying proclaimed that "a true state of emergency now exists."

But Brown, who is expected to run for the U.S. Senate next year, clearly did not relish the idea of offending his environmentalist constituency. At midweek he ignored the recommendation of his own Medfly advisory committee and refused to allow aerial spraying. Brown explained that he did not want Californians "waking up in the middle of the night to those helicopters spraying the garden, the street light, the roof, the child's bicycle, the swimming pool and everything else."

Instead, he ordered a step-up in the ground war against the Medfly. But that war clearly was not working. Worse yet, his own agriculture officials made an embarrassed admission: among millions of sterile male flies released by the state, some were in fact fertile. At week's end, after Secretary Block's warning, Brown finally relented. Though he charged that the Reagan Administration's threat of a quarantine was politically inspired "sabotage" of his own efforts to eradicate the Medfly, he reluctantly agreed to allow spraying, starting this week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.