Black Friday, Then Brown Rot

By Frederic Golden

California's stubborn Medfly shows up in a lush new area

In San Jose, Calif., an imported-car dealer offers a cash bounty of $100 to any customer who brings in a Mediterranean fruit fly, dead or alive. The hot novelty item in San Francisco gift shops is a Medfly encased in a clear plastic apple. From Silicon Valley's computer whizzes comes a new video game called Medfly Mania: to stem a tide of electronic insects, the players must choose among competing insect-killing strategies while dealing with such all too real obstacles as bad weather, helicopter failures and the accidental release of fertile male flies.

That sort of gallows humor was just about the only relief Californians had last week from their worst agricultural crisis in years. Despite stepped-up chemical warfare, the epidemic of Mediterranean fruit flies showed no signs of waning. The creatures spread beyond the populated suburbs south of San Francisco and approached the very heartland of California's $14 billion-a-year agricultural industry, the fertile 12,000-sq.-mi. San Joaquin Valley. Repercussions were quick and far-reaching. Even as helicopters doused the lush fields and orchards with pesticide, word came from Japan, California's largest overseas agricultural customer (more than $100 million in purchases last year), that it would no longer buy any fruit or vegetables--more than 200 different products ranging from avocados to walnuts--in which the Medflies lay their eggs.

After anxious negotiations between Washington and Tokyo, plus a none-too-subtle warning from California's Governor Jerry Brown that his state might retaliate by boycotting Japanese wares, Japan backed down. At least temporarily, it agreed to accept produce guaranteed to be pest-free. But the Japanese could quickly reverse themselves, and to reassure them, the U.S. Department of Agriculture dispatched a delegation of technical experts to Tokyo to explain just what the U.S. is doing to curb the infestation. Said one American official: "They've got some legitimate concerns."

So do California's farmers. It has been more than a year since Medflies were discovered almost simultaneously in Los Angeles and in Santa Clara County, just south of San Francisco. No one knows where they came from--perhaps in contaminated fruit from Hawaii. But farmers, recalling the devastating losses from past outbreaks, immediately clamored for aerial spraying with malathion, a mild garden-variety pesticide that kills off Mediterranean fruit flies while causing no apparent harm to humans. Nonetheless, California's Governor, who plans to run for the U.S. Senate next year, refused to allow what he called a rain of chemicals on residential areas. Instead, he opted for a slower and more laborious tactic: spraying individual trees from the ground, stripping them of fruit and releasing numbers of sterile male fruit flies to divert females from fertile males and thus keep them from producing offspring.

This "integrated pest management program," as it was called, seemed to work in Los Angeles. But the speckled little bugs continued to show up in the north. By July, officials found Medflies at more than 100 sites and worriedly placed three counties under quarantine. Roadblocks were set up and officials confiscated fruit from vehicles leaving the area. Still, Brown stubbornly refused to permit aerial spraying--until the Reagan Administration finally threatened to embargo all California produce. By then, it may have been too late. Two weeks ago, on what San Joaquin farmers now call Black Friday, a fertile female Medfly was discovered in a trap placed in an apricot orchard owned by Gene Bays, a third-generation California grower in the small town of Westley (pop. 800), near the western edge of the rich farm lands.

Helicopters began spraying malathion the very next day. But still more flies were found. With two neighbors, Bays sent up four crop-dusting biplanes, that released clouds of Diphos, a more powerful pesticide. Next day the number of trapped flies dropped sharply. But farm officials recognized the difficulty of eliminating an insect that can produce 500 or more offspring in a month-long lifetime. In Modesto, not far from San Joaquin's lush fields, where tomato, peach and melon crops are now ripening, one had this to say about the tiny foe: "It's probably some place out there already and we just don't know it yet."

In Sacramento and Washington--to say nothing of President Reagan's Rancho del Cielo--Republicans could take wry pleasure in speculating about the effects of the Medfly crisis on the Democratic Governor's political ambitions. Farmers began declaring that the state's real plague is "Brown rot." A new poll showed that a stunning 60% of all Californians rated Brown's handling of the situation as poor.

Yet unless the Medflies are contained, they could spread to other states as well. Some have already appeared in Florida. Each new outbreak will require more spraying, at considerable cost. Much produce would be lost, and consumers would have to pay more for fruit and vegetables, spoiling the Reagan Administration's anti-inflation efforts. Everyone would be a loser.

--By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Dick Thompson/Modesto

With reporting by Dick Thompson

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