Ventura County is besieged.
One after another, neighborhoods across a wide swath of Southern California have fallen to a swarm of invaders. Ventura County has not yet succumbed to this hungry horde, but its defenses are being tested almost daily. Luck and vigilance have prevailed so far, but this situation could change dramatically at any time.
Martial metaphors are disturbingly appropriate when discussing the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) and Huanglongbing (HLB), the untreatable, incurable and always fatal plant disease the insect carries. For nearly five years, federal, state and local forces have been engaged in a pitched battle against the psyllid, which was first detected in California in 2008. The war has been waged with chemical weapons, block by block across much of the Southland, with utterly disheartening results.
ACP overran urban Los Angeles County last year despite dogged and very expensive efforts to eradicate it. This year, it has swarmed across western Riverside County as well, and it is now spreading into the major citrus-growing areas of San Bernardino County. At the current rate of expansion, it appears likely that ACP will eventually become entrenched in every county between here and the Mexican border.
The battle is not being waged with chemicals alone. Public information and community outreach also play key roles. Because the insect and disease are primarily being moved around the world by humans transporting infested and/or infected plants and fruit, eliminating such movement is a crucial first line of defense.
That's why my organization and a coalition of community leaders have spent nearly three years spreading these messages: Eat fruit where you pick it; buy new trees from a certified source in your own community; inspect your own trees often for signs of the pest.
Since mid-September, there have been 13 new detections of ACP in Ventura County. It's impossible to say exactly how those bugs got here, but get here they did.
When this happens — and recurrent introductions are inevitable, given the huge ACP population now straddling all major transportation corridors leading out of the Los Angeles metropolitan area — we must be prepared to respond promptly with the only effective weapons we have, chemical insecticides. And this is as true of suburban yards as it is of commercial groves.
So far, cooperation has been good. Each detection in Ventura County has been followed by appropriate treatment. So far, we have seen no evidence of a breeding ACP population in our county.
But we cannot allow this to lull us into complacency. Complacency doomed Florida's citrus industry, as growers allowed the ACP population to spread unchecked until the disease arrived and it was too late to stop the plague from spreading. And complacency could still doom California's because HLB also has arrived here: An infected tree was located and destroyed earlier this year in Hacienda Heights.
It is extremely improbable that agricultural authorities stumbled across the only HLB-positive tree among the millions of backyard citrus trees in Southern California.
It is likely that other infected trees still await detection. And it won't take long for an ACP population as large as the one in Los Angeles and Riverside counties to turn one infected tree — or two, or a dozen — into tens of thousands. From there, it's not a big leap to the circumstances now found in Florida.
This makes it even more imperative that Ventura County's citrus growers and urban residents continue to cooperate in maintaining a bulwark against the invading force to the south of us. Together, the bug and the disease-causing bacterium it transmits are capable of killing every citrus tree in our county — commercial orchards and residential plantings alike — extinguishing both a source of economic vitality and an iconic element of the regional landscape.
That doesn't have to happen. If we all work together to swiftly locate and eliminate every new invader, it won't.
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