P.E.I. farmers ready potato shipments

SUMMERSIDE, Prince Edward Island – Farmers throughout Prince Edward Island were nervously gearing up to send their first shipments of potatoes across the U.S. border Monday, hoping they’ve finally seen the end of a bitter six-month trade dispute.

Trucks were preparing to load millions of potatoes after officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency fanned out across the province over the weekend to inspect the shipments for any signs of the potato wart disease.

All of the potatoes destined for the U.S. market had to be visually examined and approved before they could leave the Island under conditions set out in an agreement reached last week ending the U.S. ban on P.E.I. potatoes.

But many jittery packers said the true test will come when the trucks pull up to the American border in Houlton, Maine, and find out whether they’ll be allowed to cross into the United States.

“We all are nervous because you’re walking into something blind here,” Wayne Clark of the P.E.I. Produce packing plant in Summerside said while getting a couple of trucks ready to head out Monday.

“We’ve had this mess all winter, so we’re not sure what we’re doing. The first trucks are going to be the sacrificial lambs.”

Most packers, who’ve watched two earlier deals collapse, said they would wait to see how the first shipments go Monday and then send their trucks to the border, where U.S. officials will again inspect the potatoes.

Don Flannery of the Maine Potato Board says the agency will closely monitor the imports for signs of the blight, a highly contagious disease that doesn’t harm humans or other crops, but causes unsightly bumps that leave potatoes unmarketable.

“If there’s another find, all bets are off” on future imports, Flannery said.

The agreement ends a nasty feud that erupted last October when 72 potatoes from a small Island field were found to have the black cauliflowerlike growth.

Washington closed the border, infuriating farmers and scientists, who said 10,000 tests proving the wart had not spread to other farms showed the dispute was more about protectionism than valid agricultural fears.

The latest deal, which affects only potatoes harvested in 2000, came last week after the United States dropped onerous conditions on the movement of potatoes within Canada.

Farmers, estimated to have lost $30 million in the dispute, say they feel more optimistic this deal will stand, but are still reluctant to dispatch large loads of potatoes to the border until they know others have made it through.

“We’ve been to the border a couple of times already and [have been] sent home so we’ll let someone else take the first loads through,” said Rod Nicholson of Mid-Isle Farms in nearby Albany.

“We’ll see how the day goes along and then maybe we’ll book more trucks, but we’re hopeful there won’t be holdups at the border.”

The deal allows shipment to the United States of table potatoes from 80 percent of P.E.I. farms if they have been washed, sprouted, packed in bags of not more than 50 pounds and visually inspected.

Don Love of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday they hadn’t found any infected potatoes after sifting through several massive bins of potatoes that would be packaged and then loaded onto trucks.

The agency called in extra workers and reassigned others throughout the weekend to examine the potatoes, as four-person crews inspected about 12,000 potatoes in five hours.

“That’s a fairly onerous task because there are several thousand truckloads of potatoes that are eligible and will be exported from P.E.I. over next couple of months,” Love said Sunday in Charlottetown.