Tomato growers fire back
By
SUSAN SALISBURY
Palm Beach
Post Staff Writer
Thursday,
July 10, 2008
Saying sales of their
crops are still down 30 to 40 percent, Florida tomato
growers are lining up congressional support to seek
restitution for millions of dollars in losses linked to
the nation's salmonella outbreak.
"We believe it is maybe
$100 million or more in Florida," said J. Luis
Rodriguez, trade adviser for Florida Farmers Inc. in
Lake Worth.
Rodriguez said Thursday
that Florida growers, many with multistate operations,
plan to work with members of Congress such as Rep. Allen
Boyd, D-Panama City, to seek an appropriation. He
expects it will take about six weeks to document and
tally the losses.
"We will go that route
rather than sue the FDA," Rodriguez said. "We hope the
government recognizes that the FDA really, really
screwed up and these growers are entitled to
compensation.
"They basically threw the
crop under the bus."
The Food and Drug
Administration expanded its salmonella advisory
nationwide June 7, warning consumers not to eat red
plum, red Roma or red round tomatoes unless they came
from approved areas. Since April, 1,065 people infected
with the same strain of the salmonella
Saintpaulbacterium have been identified in 42 states,
the District of Columbia and Canada, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The FDA and CDC expanded
their suspect list from tomatoes alone this week to
include raw jalapeño peppers, raw serrano peppers and
fresh cilantro.
Since the government
warning, many retailers and restaurants pulled tomatoes,
and some consumers began to avoid even those deemed
safe.
For Billy Don Grant,
managing partner of Gadsden Tomato Co. in Quincy, the
advisory couldn't have come at a worse time.
"When they announced the
salmonella, it stopped business. Everybody stopped
buying," said Grant, one of about 25 tomato growers in
Gadsden County in North Florida on the Georgia state
line.
The company saw the price
it received for a 25-pound box of tomatoes drop from $16
to $6, he said. What had been anticipated as a
profitable season turned into a bust.
"It takes $9.50 a box to
break even," Grant said. "We have increased costs ...
then we get our profit and a good year knocked out from
under us because of the FDA and CDC."
The FDA needs to totally
clear tomatoes or the fall crop will suffer as well,
Grant said.
Kathy Means, spokeswoman
for the Produce Marketing Association in Newark, Del.,
said a survey the group conducted June 13-19 found that
two-thirds of consumers had stopped purchasing tomatoes.
Yet 88 percent of those
consumers indicated that they normally bought fresh
tomatoes anywhere from one to 60 times a year.
"We know this does last
with consumers. Spinach sales are still not back up to
pre-outbreak levels," Means said, referring to the E.
coli outbreak traced to California spinach fields in
2006.
Florida Agriculture
Commissioner Charles Bronson said Thursday he supports
the growers' efforts to be compensated for their losses.
"I said from the
beginning that Florida-grown tomatoes are produced under
the strictest practices in the nation and were not the
source of the salmonella outbreak," Bronson said.
What to avoid
Federal regulators have
issued these guidelines on the salmonella outbreak: