USDA-APHIS Revising How It Updates Pest Quarantines; Here’s What it Means for You
The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) plans to revise the regulations governing domestic quarantines for plant pests by moving lists of quarantined areas and regulated articles to the APHIS website. This amendment will provide a more notice-based, streamlined approach to update the lists while continuing to protect plant health.
Under the Plant Protection Act, USDA is authorized to restrict the interstate movement of plants, plants products, and other articles associated with the regulated area, (such as soil, farm equipment, tools, containers, and conveyances) to prevent the dissemination of plant pests and noxious weeds within the U.S., and to issue the associated regulations. Under the same authority, APHIS designates quarantined areas for plant pests to prevent their spread to new areas.
APHIS currently lists and updates quarantine areas and regulated articles within the regulations published in the Federal Register (FR). This requires an extensive rulemaking process to make changes and is sometimes outpaced by the rapid expansion or contraction of plant pest quarantine areas or the need to add or remove regulated articles. The proposed action will revise current regulations to establish processes for maintaining quarantine lists and regulated articles on APHIS’ plant pest program websites reducing the time it takes to issue updates.
Under the proposed action, for further changes to quarantine areas, APHIS would issue a Federal Order designating a quarantine area and would update the list of quarantined areas on the relevant plant pest program website. Once a year, APHIS would issue one notice informing the public of updates to the lists of quarantine areas for all plant pest since the issuance of the previous notice.
“We’re generally supportive of agency efforts to streamline processes and move closer to the ‘speed of business,’ so long as due process and transparency are not sacrificed,” says Craig Regelbrugge, Executive Vice President Advocacy, Research, & Industry Relations at AmericanHort in response to the announcement and how it might affect the horticulture industry. “Certainly, when revisions are beneficial to horticulture, we’d like them to happen in a timely fashion. Changes that are not welcomed by industry are another matter, but on balance these changes appear mostly helpful.”
APHIS is making the proposed action available to the public for review and comment. All comments received on or before Aug. 15, 2022, will be considered. To review the proposed rule, and make comments. go to www.regulations.gov and enter APHIS-2019-0035 in the Search field.
Learn more here.
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