Re: Re: overseas shipping

Mike and Bob Pries -- Thanks for your replies. The last time I shipped anything was 2 1/2 years ago. As an individual, non-commercial shipper, I simply had to set up an appointment for the Dept of Agriculture inspector to visit here and inspect the materials (rhizomes) I proposed to ship. That part was easy. There was a fee of $23 to cover administrative costs and issue the phyto-sanitary certificate, but I was surprised to learn that that was for each package, no matter that they were looked at during the same visit. This seems to me to be unreasonable. While a commercial shipper can recover the cost by adding it to the price of the items shipped, that doesn't apply to the non-commercial shipper. Still, the fact that even some commercial growers are being discouraged from shipping overseas is worrisome. Your experience, Mike, of things getting better last year unfortunately wasn't shared by everyone. It was last year that one such grower of my acquaintance, describing the last attempted shipment (to England) as a "nightmare", said that, after several frustrated attempts to process the paperwork, the inspector simply gave up. And so did the grower. In that case, it seemed that the problem resulted from the then-recent reclassification of irises as perennials.
Perhaps this is something we should try to keep an eye on to see if things do improve this year. Could a notice in the Bulletin solicit growers' experiences as a means of focusing attention and possible action on the problem? Dealing with multiple bureaucracies ain't gonna be easy. -- Griff
----- Original Message ----- From: "sutton's iris gardens" <info@suttoniris.com> 
To: <iris@hort.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 4:17 PM
Subject: [iris] Re: overseas shipping



Hi Griff,
We don't seem to have any problems importing, in fact none, other than phyto certs. It might be difficult for the overseas folks to ship here but the acquisition on this end is easy. Getting iris out to other countries is extremely difficult, especially those with quarantine requirements. Two years ago we couldn't ship anything to EU countries as they had put up an insurmountable barrier. That was eased last year a bit but required inspections of the gardens 3 times per year by a Dept. of Ag official. Hopefully everybody has their head on straight now and things will go smoothly both ways.... We were told that a large part of the problem is that iris are such a small crop $$wise that not many resources or effort is focused on the problems. I guess we will just have to make iris a much bigger crop....:-) 
Mike Sutton

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