Martin said:

> So you suggest the best way to avoid new pests and diseases 
> is to stop the transportation of living organisms? 

Under WTO rules as they stand, there is little chance of stopping 
such trade completely even if we wanted.  What WOULD help would 
be the port-of-entry inspections that work so well for Australia 
and New Zealand at keeping those countries free of invasive bee
pests.

Certainly Martin cannot deny the USA the same level of concern
that his own country has about invasive exotic diseases and
pests, can he?  Argentina has done actual surveys to support
their contention that they are free of Small Hive Beetle and
the Tropilaelaps mite, and they have set up a national vet
authority to comply with WTO rules, so they are interested 
enough in blocking imports to declare themselves "pest free" 
for both those pests.  (Pity about the AHB, though. Hope you 
can somehow still keep from finding them in the province of 
Buenos Aires.)

I see no reason to allow the importation of living creatures 
without some level of disease and pest screening.  To our
knowledge, bees are the only living creatures not inspected
at USA port-of-entry on at least a sampling/screening basis.

> The US border was closed to all bee imports... from 1922 until 2005. 
> I am not aware of any legal importation made in your country during 
> this period of 83 years. However, in the meantime the US was invaded 
> by tracheal mites (1984), varroa mites (1987), Africanized honey bees 
> (1990) and small hive beetles (1998). All this events predate the 
> opening of the border to trade, both Australian and New Zealand imports. 

Martin is simply unaware of the actual history.  There were 
quite a few "imports of bees" into the USA between 1992 and 
2005, but there were multiple factors behind them:

1) Containerized multi-mode freight, which grew in the late 
   1970s, resulting in goods that could move planetwide 
   fast enough that swarms of bees would survive the trip.

2) A massive cutback in the regulatory oversight power of the
   US Interstate Commerce Commission in 1955, which allowed 
   fully integrated ship-rail-truck "door to door" shipping 
   to be booked and even provided by single carriers.

3) Deregulation of rates charged for maritime shipments in 1984
   (trucking and rail were deregulated in the 1970s), which 
   made it more profitable to import goods from the other side 
   of the planet. Right about this time, Sam Walton died, and
   Wal-Mart changed its tag line from "Made In the USA" to
   "Always Low Prices", which should have been a clue.

4) The changes to GATT Article XX(b) (Sanitary and Phytosanitary 
   "SPS") regulations in the Uruguay Round of GATT, in 1986.
   The change made in much harder for a country to limit imports
   based upon health and safety concerns.  This grew into the
   draconian SPS rules of the current WTO agreement, which force
   countries to accept diseased and contaminated shipments simply
   because they had one diseased/contaminated shipment slip through 
   in the past, thus "establishing" a pest or disease in the 
   receiving country.

The result was that, in the 1980s, a lot of containers were 
suddenly being sealed at an inland location away from ports 
and their inspectors, being opened for the first time at 
their ultimate destination, and getting to those destinations 
faster than ever before.  Needless to say, the odds of swarms 
being delivered along with the goods were rather high.  
(The odds were good that the goods were odd!)

There was also overtly legal "trade in bees" during this period. 
The factors that enhanced the pest-and-disease carrying capacity
of these imports include: 

5) The Canadian border closure of 1987.  What resulted was 
   Canada buying bees from overseas, yet bees still were allowed
   to be sold in queen and package form to the USA with
   nothing more than a cursory level of paperwork.  

6) There are multiple US beekeepers who were able to bring 
   truckloads of full hives from Canada into the USA, 
   apparently under the rules intended to allow "packages".  
   While "bees on comb" should have been disallowed, the 
   border was managed informally in the 1980s and 1990s, 
   and apparently, import paperwork was not specific as 
   to the difference between a "packages" of bees and 
   actual "hives" of bees.

So, the way the USA has been doing things, any and all trade
is potentially "trade in bees", but it should be clear that
actual overt shipping of thousands of packages of bees at
a time multiple times per year is an excellent way to get 
a new bee pest or disease on our shores, and are the
obvious first type of "trade" to start sampling and screening.

The establishment of Apis ceranae in Australia is proof
that shipments need to be screened at port of entry.
Australia continues to blame a sailboat, but the number
of swarms they ended up finding tends to indicate that
the sailboat mast was merely where a swarm from the
original colony went, and was not the first swarm to 
arrive.

And while stringent biosecurity with inspections of all
freight for hitchhiking bees (as done by NZ and Oz) would
be nice, we should start by admitting that we can't stand
by and let any opportunity to sample and screen pass us by.

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