U.S. pallet industry urges domestic action against wood-eating pests

The U.S. wood pallet industry has an effective plan for its part to prevent the spread of invasive wood-eating pests throughout the nation's forests, but is increasingly frustrated by what it says is a failure by the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to act upon it.

The Alexandria, Va.-based National Wooden Pallet and Container Association proposed that APHIS quickly adopt a national standard consistent with the international standard for treating wood packaging against pest infestations. 

You might well ask why an industry would advocate implementation of a new government regulation on their product, said Bruce Scholnick, NWPCA president and chief executive officer, in a Sept. 5 letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Edward Schafer. The threat of invasive species destroying our nation's trees is a crisis of such magnitude it warrants immediate decisive action.

Failure to act puts our forests in peril and threatens our industry, and in fact all wood-related industries, with extinction, Scholnick warned.

ISPM (International Standard for Phytosanitary Measures) 15 requires that wood packaging be heat treated or fumigated. Each treated pallet must also be identified with an internationally accepted mark.

ISPM 15 has been implemented by more than 150 countries and has proven to be 99.9 percent effective in eliminating the spread of non-native wood-eating beetles, NWPCA said.

Since December 2006, when APHIS announced a multistate quarantine on untreated wood to help contain the emerald ash borer, the NWPCA has encouraged the USDA to embrace ISPM 15 to help control this pest and others, such as the Asian long-horned beetle, sirex noctillio and pine shoot bettle. There are more than 25 wood-related invasive species being monitored, but they have not yet reached the critical mass needed for APHIS to take action, the NWPCA said.

The NWPCA noted two systemic problems in APHIS, which it said are blocking the resolution to a crisis.

The practice of APHIS is to act in a remedial fashion not a preventative one, Scholnick explained. The agency traditionally reacts to a defined problem in a specific location, and then applies a solution to that area; when the problem arises in another location, they apply the solution there.

We do not have the luxury for this historic approach to problems while our nation's trees are being devoured, he said. Many APHIS specialists have told us they fear the ash tree is doomed to go the way of the American chestnut -- just a memory.

NWPCA praised APHIS for its work to implement ISPM 15 for international flows of wood packaging.

That approach has been effective in dealing with the wide-ranging pests around the world and addressed the varied abilities of wood packaging companies to comply, Scholnick said.

However, domestically, the NWPCA pointed out that APHIS pest specialists continue to address each individual wood-eating species as a unique problem.

These specialists work in isolation researching approaches to halt the spread of a particular bug in a specific location, Scholnick said. This reactive approach that has regulators following behind the bugs and applying narrow piecemeal standards will not work in today's world, given the rapid movement of goods across the country and around the world. Further, this policy is likely to end with a dozen different regulations on solid wood packaging which would bring interstate commerce to a grinding halt.

The NWPCA asked Agriculture Secretary Schafer to use his authority to apply a domestic regulation consistent with the ISPM 15 international standard for solid wood packaging.

Let us not wait for the uncertainty of the priorities of a new administration to move legislation that already has bipartisan and broad public and private support, Scholnick said.

Source: American Shipper