Goodbye Fruit Flies? Here’s a New 5-Year Strategy To Fight The Pests
USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has released “Fruit Fly Exclusion and Detection Program Fiscal Years 2024-2028 Strategy.” APHIS worked with members of the National Plant Board to develop a unified roadmap for USDA and its partners to protect American agriculture from the threat of invasive fruit flies and measure our progress along the way.
The five-year strategy prioritizes strengthening the following goals for fruit flies of regulatory significance:
- Domestic surveillance to support early detection.
- Management and emergency response to ensure timely mitigation.
- Targeted and effective sterile insect technique for preventive release and eradication programs (assuring rearing facilities are maintained for efficiency and safety).
- International and import efforts to mitigate against the introduction and spread of invasive fruit flies in the United States.
To address the unprecedented outbreaks of exotic fruit flies, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently released $103.5 million from the Commodity Credit Corporation to fund APHIS’ supplementary emergency response activities. These funds allow APHIS to reach beyond what the agency’s appropriated funding would be able to accomplish over the next few years.
Currently, there are exotic fruit fly quarantines in eight counties in California and five counties in New York. The California Department of Food and Agriculture and APHIS have established parallel quarantines and are working with the State’s agricultural commissioners to eradicate and prevent the statewide spread of the Queensland fruit fly, Tau fruit fly, Mediterranean fruit fly, and Oriental fruit fly in California. APHIS is also working with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets to manage the European cherry fruit fly in upstate New York.
For more, continue reading at aphis.usda.gov.
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