Mexican farmers angry over FDA salmonella probe

Farmers are mad enough to throw, well, rotten tomatoes at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is focusing heavily on Mexico as a potential source of the fruit that has sickened hundreds of people in the United States with salmonella. Mexican tomatoes are putrefying in warehouses south of the border. Producers say they're losing millions of dollars in export sales even though U.S. health officials haven't discovered the pathogen in any of the Mexican samples they've tested. "This situation is terrible," said Antonio Ruiz, general manager of Agricola Caborita, a firm in the western state of Sinaloa that sells tomatoes to the American market. "We have hundreds of canceled orders. . . . We're worried and angry because we know that our product isn't to blame, yet we're paying the consequences." The headline in an earlier online version of this article referred to the "USDA salmonella probe." It is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, not the Department of Agriculture, conducting the inquiry. A photo caption in the print edition also incorrectly referred to the USDA instead of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA advised U.S. consumers a little more than a week ago to avoid eating raw red plum, red Roma or round red tomatoes. Mexico is a major supplier of those varieties to the U.S. market, exporting about 800,000 tons to its neighbor last year, according to Mexico's agriculture secretariat. The FDA said last week that it was focusing its investigation on Mexico and central and southern Florida, which provided the bulk of America's tomatoes in April, when the first salmonella cases appeared. The FDA has not banned imports of Mexican tomatoes. In fact tomatoes grown in the northern Mexican state of Baja California appear on the agency's "safe list" of regions whose fruit U.S. officials have determined is not tainted. Baja tomatoes weren't being harvested at the time of the outbreak. But Mexican producers say the exclusion of all other major Mexican growing regions from the safe list has crippled sales. They say U.S. customers are steering clear of all Mexican tomatoes until the FDA can give the nation a clean bill of health. Ignacio Aguilar, owner of Nacho's Wholesale Produce in Los Angeles, said tomato sales had plunged 70% since last week. Buyers don't even want tomatoes from Baja. "They don't want to take any chances," he said. "They're afraid that people might get sick."