It’s been eight months since the state Agriculture Department added Biosecurity to its name. The addition was meant to reflect the responsibility of keeping invasive species from invading Hawaiʻi’s shores, but the department has been under fire from lawmakers for its efforts to stop the spread of pests, like the coconut rhinoceros beetle.
HPR spoke with Director and Board Chair Sharon Hurd and Plant Quarantine Manager Jonathan Ho about the department and its struggles with understaffing and lack of funding.
Interview Highlights
On challenges facing the department
JONATHAN HO: With the lack of resources, you know, invasive species and pests are a constant pressure to the state. And the ability to have discretion… Specific types of things you need discretion. And a lot of the issues as it relates to like some of the measures that are being put forth, it's like everything is prohibited, everything requires treatments, and trying to manage the ability to do the work that needs to be done to protect the state from the next, you know, coconut rhinoceros beetle or whatever that may be, versus ensuring, you know, obviously, commerce people having the ability to eat, right? We import like 90% of our food. And you know, cost of living is very high. Treating or destroying or refusing everything that has anything on it, whether it's good, bad, negligible, creates these added costs that can get pushed down the line.
On "lightly infested cargo"
HO: There's been a little bit of a misunderstanding, I think, to the extent of that. “Lightly infested” is, I think, when you hear it, it sounds terrible because there's no quantifier built to it. So that “lightly infested” term, or, I guess that example that was used for an organism that is widespread throughout the state, it's already here, and to require treatment or destruction of that refusal of that particular commodity really wouldn't push the, you know, the ball toward what we need to do, because it's here already. But again, going back to that idea of like, what is high priority and which things there are. Like, for example, we had CRB. We won't see CRB in imported shipment because the continental United States doesn't have coconut rhinoceros beetles. But high priority pests — treat, destroy, refuse.
On Hawaiʻi's constraints as a state
HO: Hawaiʻi is a state, and we're essentially kind of constrained by federalism. So a lot of the pests that are of like, you know, I think people care about right? So you figure, I think like CRB, coqui frog. So CRB likely came from Guam for entry. Guam is considered foreign, so we have no jurisdiction. Coqui frog, Puerto Rico, same thing, considered foreign. Another big one that's kind of on the rise is Queensland Longhorn Beetle from Australia. No jurisdiction. And then little fire ants. Possible that it came from Florida, it's also possible it came from South America. So I think that portion, the state can never create enough regulation to get past the federalism. And I think a lot of times people will think about like, ‘oh, we should be like, New Zealand, we're an island,’ and all of that stuff. And I'm in agreement that there's a lot to learn from them. You know, they've been at it, their big biosecurity stuff. They're 35 years ahead of us, and they have come up with a lot of systems that, again, the state is trying to implement. But they're a country, right?
SHARON HURD: They're a nation, so they can make laws that are the laws of the land. We can make laws, but they're the laws of the state, then we are preempted by the laws of the land.
On the floriculture and nursery industry
HURD: The flower industry has been the first one to step up and say, ‘hey.’ And what that is, is boots on the ground. If there's an outbreak of an invasive, we have our staff, and we have the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and the local county invasive species, but that's maybe a total of 60 people we can deploy at any given moment. The industry, on the other hand, has about 600 that — they've agreed, there was when the agreement process, right now, in a pilot program — that if there's an invasive that we've discovered, maybe a new one, they're going through training. They're signing agreements that they're willing to be trained by Jonathan’s staff. They're going to be provided with a PPE that they need, and if they have the equipment that would help us, they've agreed to provide that. They'll be trained. And together with this cadre of people, this rapid response team, they can delimit the area, work inside. So the industry understands that they've been singled out, but they want to be part of the solution.
This story aired on The Conversation on March 6, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
