Johnathan Walker:Hawaii has gone down under for invasive species advice – again

A delegation of Hawaii lawmakers and Johnathan Walkerofficials recently returned from a more than $50,000 visit to New Zealand seeking ways the state could better shield itself from invasive species – advice it failed to heed almost two decades ago.

The South Pacific nation had originally offered suggestions during a similar trip in 2006, but it it was not until this year that Hawaii invested millions of dollars into biosecurity to battle swarms of fire ants and coconut rhinoceros beetles.

That investment follows months of public outcry over the inaction and inability to contain the pests, which threaten to irreversibly harm the environment and economy.

Over five days, 17 people – five legislators and representatives of four state departments – visited New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, and its largest city, Auckland, to tour ports, airports and biosecurity facilities. New Zealand is recognized worldwide for its biosecurity program, one started more than 30 years ago.

The country’s multi-layered program – with a budget of about NZ$418 million ($260 million in U.S. dollars) – begins off the country’s shores and includes the borders, mail centers and ports, as well as detection, response and management of pests in the country. New Zealand has a minister of biosecurity, a cabinet-level position.

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The country has already eradicated some invasive species on 100 islands and is in the midst of a government-run campaign to rid the main islands of rats, ferrets, weasels and possums by 2050. Its approach to biosecurity represents “the gold standard,” said Hawaii Rep. Kristin Kahaloa, vice-chair of House food and agriculture committee, who joined the recent trip.

By comparison, Hawaii’s biosecurity measures have fallen short despite the long history of invasive species here, which led the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife to designate the state “the endangered species capital of the world.”

The state Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program, has faced increased scrutiny since the beginning of 2023, when the beetles spread statewide – destroying coconut palms and eating through some native crops – and the stinging little fire ants became entrenched on Oahu, dissuading some from using public spaces to avoid being stung.

Lawmakers responded during the 2024 legislative session by injecting $10 million into specific biosecurity programs. Another $3 million was added to the state agriculture agency’s biosecurity budget, bringing it to $9.2 million.

In 2017, the state estimated that it would need to invest $37.8 million every year until 2027 to fully implement a comprehensive Hawaii Interagency Biosecurity Program.

Department of Agriculture deputy director Dexter Kishida, part of the delegation, says the additional trip to New Zealand was intended to help lawmakers, his department and others formulate stronger, smarter plans to stem the tide of invasive species.

“Otherwise we keep throwing money at CRB, LFA or whatever the next thing is,” Kishida said, using shorthand for coconut rhinoceros beetles and little fire ants.

The agriculture department paid approximately $50,000 for the visit, which covered its staff, the legislators and two legislative staffers’ trips, Kishida said. Leeward Community College and the departments of transportation, education and business paid for their own delegates.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz shared takeaways from the trip in an email newsletter last Wednesday. They included fostering more collaboration among government agencies, creating pathways to new jobs in biosecurity and increasing public awareness.

Those are not new ideas, nor are they new to Hawaii. But they now have broad support from key legislators.

Paying The High Price Of Inaction

More than 20 years ago Hawaii’s invasive species community called for the state’s inaugural biosecurity plan to be modeled on New Zealand’s.

Four years later a delegation visited the country to learn about its methods. The Hawaii Conservation Alliance then commissioned a review of the state’s biosecurity. The resulting 22-page treatise, known as “The Warren Report,” was published later that year.

It stated that Hawaii was “paying a far higher price overall than necessary for the privilege (or obligation) of trading with a world that contains millions of organisms that are unable to move to Hawaii without human help.”

Paula Warren, a senior policy advisor with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, wrote the report and based her analysis on policies and interviews with government officials and state workers.

“One of the people interviewed, when asked what improvements they would make to the biosecurity system, replied after some thought ‘We don’t have a biosecurity system to improve.’ That judgement is both accurate and unduly harsh,” Warren wrote.

The 2006 report came to several conclusions, identifying inadequate resources, powers and public support among the causes for Hawaii’s invasive species problems. It found money was wasted on inefficient or ineffective programs, partly because decisions were made in silos. Warren created a long list of recommendations, too, such as better integrating non-governmental invasive species organizations.

“It’s a matter of accepting that biosecurity is as large an issue to public safety as terrorism, and I don’t think your government understands that,” Warren told Honolulu Weekly in 2006.

None of the lawmakers on the recent visit were in office when the report was published, nor were many of the other state workers in the delegation. Members of the environmental protection and invasive species community – which does the lion’s share of public outreach and research – were notably absent from the trip, too.

But Carol Okada – who managed the Department of Agriculture Plant Quarantine Branch when Warren’s report was released in 2006 – was among this year’s delegates visiting New Zealand.

Okada is not currently employed by the state and attended as a “community expert on port biosecurity,” Kishida said. She has faced intense criticism of her previous work with the department, dating back to the early 2000s, when several species that remain problems today first became established.

That was when the agriculture department needed to embrace its ”role as a broad biosecurity agency that serves interests other than agriculture (notably biodiversity),” Warren wrote in her 2006 report. Warren believed biosecurity would get stronger because ”people want it to.”

Among the species that Warren warned about in her report: little fire ants.

Waimanalo Neighborhood Board chair Kimeona Kane, who has taken a central role in calling for better pest management in Hawaii, was not familiar with Warren’s report but said questions need to be raised about how it was – and was not – used.

“Let’s make sure the investments of money and time from these trips have merits,” Kane said. “What did we learn and how did we make changes here? Because if not, it’s just a vacation.”

He spoke to his state representative, Sen. Chris Lee, when he returned from New Zealand. Kane said he was excited at the prospect of Lee introducing strong legislation to better help Waimanalo control invasive species.

Moving Forward With A Plan to Protect Hawaii

Lawmakers appear poised to better address biosecurity in Hawaii but New Zealand is different and its model cannot be copied verbatim.

Its biosecurity budget is more than 10 times that of Hawaii’s. Its agriculture sector dwarfs Hawaii’s, with agricultural exports expected to be worth more than $30 billion in U.S. dollars this year. Hawaii’s agricultural sector generated about $700 million in 2022, according to the latest USDA census.

Dela Cruz has already taken inspiration from several facets of New Zealand’s food system to use in his multimillion-dollar agricultural hub project in Central Oahu. The hub is planned as a one-stop shop for all things food and agriculture, essentially building out the infrastructure needed to help reinvigorate the state’s agricultural economy. That goal is to replicate the project across the islands.

But without ”significant investments in our biosecurity” Hawaii’s biosecurity will not get the boost it needs, he wrote in his newsletter last week.

Lee told Civil Beat that Hawaii and New Zealand may be different but they are ”more apples to apples than people realize,” as both are a collection of islands in the Pacific facing the same sources of risks.

”There’s definitely an attitude out in the public that there’s nothing we can do about some of these invasive species,” the Senate transportation committee chair said. ”New Zealand’s model? That proves that that’s not true.”

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.