CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island – Regulators from Canada and the United States are set to meet again today to try to solve issues that have kept the border closed to Prince Edward Island potatoes.

Island growers thought they had that agreement late last week until truckloads of their potatoes were stopped at the Maine border Friday morning.

Last week the U.S. government had agreed to readmit P.E.I. potatoes, but imposed a 100,000-acre quarantine zone from which potato exports are banned because of potato wart.

Federal Liberal politicians on the island say they’re not happy that further delays are emerging.

“Personally I don’t think much of that,” Malpeque MP Wayne Easter said Sunday night, referring to the scheduled meeting.

“I think the time for meetings and delaying tactics by the Americans should be over. We should apply the same rules to the Americans as they’ve applied to us.”

The situation prompted Premier Pat Binns to place a call to Prime Minister Jean Chretien on Saturday night.

“He assured me that both agriculture and trade people were working on this,” Binns said in a telephone interview from his home Sunday.

“[The prime minister] couldn’t offer what measures they would take at this point, only that meetings were continuing and they were trying to help resolve the issue.”

Mitch Murphy, the Island’s minister of agriculture, was in Ottawa Monday to meet with federal trade minister Pierre Pettigrew to seek immediate action.

Murphy said Ottawa should threaten the United States with retaliatory measures if it doesn’t reopen its borders to Island potatoes.

“It is imperative that the federal government help resolve this problem immediately,” said Murphy in a press release Sunday.

Binns said he made it quite clear in his conversation with Chretien that the province’s potato industry has been brought to a virtual halt.

“I did tell him that our industry was almost at a standstill because of this situation and that every measure had to be considered,” Binns said.

“It is having a devastating effect on our potato industry and the whole provincial economy.”

Ivan Noonan, general manager of the Prince Edward Island Potato Board, said his group is “pretty disgusted” with federal Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief.

“He comes out on Thursday night and says he’ll take retaliatory measures for the [ban] zone being too big and not being scientific and yet on Friday he’s basically backtracked to where there will be no retaliatory measures,” Noonan said.

In the United States, the spokesman for the Potato Growers Association of Idaho questioned the validity of soil tests that indicated the potato wart has been confined to the corner of one field in New Annan, P.E.I.

John Thompson said, “They can test until they’re blue in the face at this time of year. I’m not going to buy it.”