Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she will have a “significant announcement” on the fight against New World screwworm within a “couple of days.” She did not offer details other than teasing that it would be a “very big step” on putting resources, time and effort into continuing to push screwworms far from the U.S. southern border.
Rollins’ comments came during extended testimony before the House Agriculture Committee on June 11. For nearly five hours, she fielded questions from lawmakers on a litany of issues facing agriculture.
Regarding the threat of New World screwworm, Rollins said the administration continues to assess the situation daily to determine if livestock imports from Mexico can resume. Those imports have been prohibited since May 11, following the discovery of NWS in northern Mexico. This followed a previous import ban enacted in November and lifted in February.
In her testimony, Rollins said the parasitic flies had migrated from roughly 1,100 miles south of the U.S. border to 700 miles in a matter of weeks. That kind of movement had not been seen in decades.
In the 1950s, NWS infestations cost U.S. cattle producers about $150 million a year. A joint U.S.-Mexico screwworm eradication commission successfully introduced sterile flies to push the pest well south of the border by 1986. Now, U.S. and Mexican officials are working to ward off another outbreak.
“I can’t underscore enough what a dire situation this is,” Rollins told the committee. “We have put tens of millions of dollars into a sterile fly production south of the border. “
According to Rollins, 30 days is the “benchmark” for evaluating improvements in the fight against NWS. U.S. officials are assessing the situation daily to determine how far south in Mexico the pests have gone. Rollins also said she regularly converses with Mexico’s agriculture minister, Julio Berdegué.
“The challenge is that the sophistication of their data collection, not surprisingly, south of the border, is not up to our standards,” Rollins said. “So they have — I will give them more credit than ever before, at least in our team’s partnership — have been more open and willing to allow our team on the ground to assess the situation.”