Last August, a crew of workers systematically confiscated every orange in a grower's in Valley Center, Calif. They buried the oranges—at least $500,000 worth of fruit in ditches on his neighbor’s property.

They did so by order of the U.S. government, which came accompanied by armed California Highway Patrol officers and which did not pay Bernard a penny for the crops. The oranges were destroyed because the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) found five Mexican fruit flies on a neighbor’s property, which it considers “an imminent threat” to California’s economy. As climate change has warmed the west coast, California has been finding more fruit flies of all sorts of varieties, including Mexican, Oriental, and Mediterranean, in its traps than it did in the past.
 
Usually, growers near where fruit flies are found must abide by a quarantine, meaning they fruit must stay on their property though they can juice it and sell that juice. Confiscation of the kind that happened in this orchard is rare, and the incident illuminates a power imbalance between farmers and a government agency that some scientists say has utterly failed the people it is supposed to protect.

“They bully growers,” says James Carey, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, about CDFA and the U.S. Department. of Agriculture (USDA), which he says work hand-in-hand to respond to pest outbreaks. “They know they can walk in, declare that the Western world as we know it will be destroyed because of fruit flies, and they have the law on their side.”

Source - https://www.freshplaza.com