HILO — It’s no secret that invasive species have stuck Hawaii with a series of ever-mounting bills. Battling fruit flies alone costs about $300 million a year. Estimates for future costs of little fire ants push past $200 million.
In an effort to stop future invasive species from arriving in-state — and more effectively manage those that are already here — the Hawaii Department of Agriculture and other state agencies have created a new biosecurity plan seeking to close existing gaps in the system.
Public meetings for the draft plan were held throughout the state over the past several weeks, drawing between 10 and more than 100 participants. Last week, officials traveled to Hilo and Kona.
“No one can do biosecurity or tackle invasive species by themselves,” facilitator Dawn Chang said last Wednesday evening during Hilo’s meeting, held at Hilo High and attended by about 40 people. “We need everyone’s help.”
The only state agency with a required biosecurity program is the DOA. The draft plan pulls in more agencies and organizations, such as the Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Department of Health and the University of Hawaii system.
Biosecurity “needs to take a collaborative approach involving all of our partners: state, federal, county,” said Paul Conry, one of the plan’s developers. “It needs to be collaborative with industry (and) it needs to be comprehensive.”
The draft plan calls for a 10-year implementation cycle and lists 152 discrete tasks to complete during that time. These include:
- implementing an interagency electronic record system for items being shipped into the state. The DOA’s Plant Quarantine branch has its own database, but it cannot communicate with other agencies’ systems or with importers who want to send information about their products before arrival.
- promoting local agriculture so fewer imports will be needed.
- allowing the DOA to inspect non-agriculture items such as potting soil and packing materials.
- hiring more staffers across departments.
- establishing a Hawaii Invasive Species Authority that would increase the role of the existing
- addressing biosecurity in statewide K-12 curricula.
- creating a biosecurity agency website.
- building more inspection facilities.
- establishing a fund and a mechanism for emergency response across agencies.
Those who offered comment on the plan agreed that more action needed to be taken regarding biosecurity, but some expressed concern about the total cost of implementation, which is estimated to be about $50 million.
“I have seen other plans sit still because they have a large price tag,” said land use planner Jeff Melrose. “It’s very hard for legislators to balance those issues with the other things on their plates … I would make a suggestion that there needs to be some kind of prioritization (of tasks).”
Eric Tanouye, owner of Green Point Nurseries Inc., said the current plan did not focus enough on supporting agriculture and that it could set Hawaii at odds with international biosecurity protocol.
“The priority is to move commerce from point A to point B and to not move invasive pests,” he said. “If Hawaii re-writes the program with … not the focus of moving commerce, if they try and make it anything other than that … (other) countries and or the (U.S. Department of Agriculture) may not accept the Hawaii plan.”
Ken Puliafico, a research entomologist, said Hawaii should look to places like Australia and New Zealand for inspiration.
“These people take biosecurity very seriously; Hawaii does not appear to take it seriously enough,” he said, pointing to the example of the agricultural forms airlines hand out prior to landing in the state.
“If they even remember to give them out,” Puliafico said. “If we actually took seriously the enforcement of existing rules, I think we could prevent a lot of the invasive species from coming in.”
“You can have all the plans in the world, but you’ve got to use them and fund them,” said Susan Hamilton, who supported Melrose’s prioritization suggestion. “We need to have some more teeth into this and do something about it.”
Many attendees discussed their firsthand experiences with invasive species, detailing attempts to control kahili ginger and strawberry guava, to eradicate nests of little fire ants and save bee colonies from varroa mites, and to stem the spread of rat lungworm disease.
“We have all these things that are really affecting our day-to-day lives,” said Andrew Christie of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The draft plan “can’t take back what’s already happened,” he said. “But hopefully it can keep out things we don’t want here — and there are a lot of things we don’t want here.”
Christie said he also felt any new regulations should not be overly onerous, in order to help local agriculture prosper.
“I think we could do a better job of helping out local farmers, ranchers and nonfood people (like horticulturists),” he said.
“It’s hard to find the funding, but the cost to trying to clean up the mess after it’s already here is dramatically higher than the cost of prevention,” said University of Hawaii at Hilo graduate student Amanda Beck.
The last day to submit written comments for the plan is Oct. 21. For more information and to view the draft plan, visit http://hdoa.hawaii.gov/blog/main/nr-mtgsbiosecurity/.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.