APHIS Releases New Five-Year Fruit Fly Prevention Plan

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In California, it’s been an unusually busy season for fruit fly invasions.

The Queensland fruit fly, Tau fruit fly, Mediterranean fruit fly, and Oriental fruit fly have all descended upon the state in recent months, leaving eight counties under fruit fly quarantines. Hundreds of different vegetables and fruits are at risk, along with the overall health of California’s agricultural business. Mark Davidson, the Deputy Administrator for the Plant Protection and Quarantine Program at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, calls the sheer number of invasive fruit fly detections “the worst of its kind in 70 years.”

To address the outbreak of exotic fruit flies and help protect American agriculture, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has released a five-year plan called the “Fruit Fly Exclusion and Detection Program Fiscal Years 2024-2028 Strategy” (FFED). The comprehensive plan, which you can read here, features four “priority goals.” These include:

  1. Strengthening surveillance and public reporting of fruit flies across America to increase early detection.

  2. Improve emergency response to ensure the quick mitigation of any threatening invasions.

  3. Strengthen methods of preventing non-native fruit flies from being imported to the United States from international countries.

  4. Encourage federal and state agencies to explore new techniques of population suppression, including male annihilation, mass trapping, and the development of improved sterile fruit fly strains.

The FFED Program has already experienced success. Two years ago, the program teamed up with a Guatemalan organization to produce “an average of one billion sterile Mediterranean fruit flies (Medflies) per week to mitigate northward movement from Mexico and Guatemala, and to release in high-risk areas of California and Florida.” That sort of collaborative problem-solving is an important part of FFED’s work.

As fruit fly invasions continue to evolve, so will the FFED Program, with the overall goal of keeping the food we eat — and the people who grow it — safe.

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