SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER | October 28, 1999 | By ROBERT McCLURE
Green crabs inadvertently imported from Europe in ships' ballast water are poised to cripple Puget Sound's multimillion-dollar shellfish harvest.
Northwest forests are likely to get nicked by the Asian longhorned beetle, which arrived with wooden crates and artificial Christmas trees imported from China. The beetle has already killed thousands of trees in New York and Chicago.
Trading ships from South America unleashed cholera into American waters, sickening 15 people in Alabama. And elms were wiped out across much of the East by a Russian fungus.
With international trade skyrocketing and ministers of the World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle next month, environmentalists yesterday offered these examples to justify their call for tighter restrictions on importation of goods that may contain pest plants and animals.
Environmentalists who want to see WTO rules changed to better protect the Earth held a breakfast near downtown Seattle to appeal for changes in WTO trading rules.
"The rules of the WTO ... intentionally constrain environmental protection," said Dan Seligman, a trade specialist for the Sierra Club. "That is what the trade rules are for. That is what they are designed to do."
Under WTO rules, a country that suspects goods being imported from another country might harbor a plant or animal that could harm its agricultural goods or forests can challenge the other nation's right to export the suspect product.
But here's the catch: The country bringing the challenge must be able to show how the imported good is dangerous. That's not always possible.
For example, the fungus that killed off America's chestnut trees earlier this century, robbing the nation of 40 percent of its lumber, was benign in its Asian homeland. Asiatic chestnuts were unaffected.
Similarly, the Dutch elm disease did not afflict elms in the Old World. Another example is the blister rust that devastated American white pines.
In each case, the plant or animal that got loose and caused damage in this country was able to do so because natural enemies that held it in check in its homeland were not present here.
Now, logs are being imported from South America and Asia to be processed in Pacific Northwest mills left hungry for lumber by the decreased timber cut permitted in U.S. national forests.
William Denison, a fungus expert and former Oregon State University researcher, estimates there is a greater than 50 percent chance that Siberian larch trees are hosts to some sort of fungus that is fatal to their close cousins here, the Douglas fir.
Russian scientists have not studied larch and the fungi they support very thoroughly, Denison said.
"We were unable to stop chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease or pine blister rust," Denison said. "Nothing that science has learned in this century about controlling forest diseases gives us any reason to hope we would be able to control a similarly destructive disease if it hit Douglas fir."
The Clinton administration has refused to forcefully prosecute a program of vigilance because it so strongly supports international trade, environmentalists charge.
They are backed up by a 1997 report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO investigated the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is supposed to keep invasive pests out of goods coming into American ports.
Anna Cherry, a spokeswoman for the inspection agency, said a government task force set up by President Clinton earlier this year is wrestling with how to best combat the spread of invasive pest plants and animals.
Yet often, the system works, Cherry said. When Asian gypsy moths were discovered in the Seattle area earlier this decade, the government moved swiftly to stem the outbreak through aerial spraying.
Meanwhile, other nations in the WTO regard environmentalist fears about goods they want to ship here as protectionist ploys to help keep out imports and boost prices for U.S.-produced goods sold here.
The Clinton administration has also resisted efforts to require ships to treat their ballast water, which can carry invasive species across the globe.
One of the most famous examples is the European green crab, which has spread toward Washington after gaining footholds in the Northeast and San Francisco Bay.
The green crab eats the larvae of shellfish, such as the Dungeness crabs of Puget Sound. Although the crab has not yet arrived in Puget Sound, it has been found in Willapa Bay in southwest Washington and in British Columbia. It will probably arrive here soon, scientists say.
Cherry, the spokeswoman for APHIS, said Americans will have to stay vigilant if they want to keep out invasive pests.
"We live in a world where this is global trade. It's a global village," she said. "There is no way to avoid the movement of goods and people."
P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or [email protected]
