U.S. Christmas Tree Growers Feud with Mexico

Spare a thought, this warm summer day, for Oregon Christmas-tree growers, who are getting a frigid reception south of the border.

Like Santa’s elves, the farmers are already sweating the Yuletide season, placing them at loggerheads with Mexico’s embryonic Christmas-tree industry. Oregon growers of the coniferous symbols of peace and hope are locked in a Scroogish trade battle with Mexicans who aim to keep out foreign trees.

To preserve their $20 million in annual sales to Mexico, Northwest growers have enlisted a New Jersey public-relations firm and federal agriculture officials, who will gather ammunition by touring Oregon farms next week. The growers have uncovered a Mexican parliamentary document that they say proves the fight is not about Douglas-fir needle midges and twig weevils, as Mexico contends, but about unvarnished protectionism.

“I wouldn’t call it the smoking gun,” says Bryan Ostlund, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association, concerning the document. “I’d call it the murder weapon.”

In an age of globalization, the Feliz Navidad spat pits buy-local champions against free traders — and green advocates on both sides of the border against one another. But even the most ardent growers see the dispute settling somewhere short of the World Trade Organization.

“We don’t want emotion to go wild here, because as you know, that can happen,” said Joe Sharp, chairman of the Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers, an Oregon Christmas-tree industry organization. “Science is the right basis for what we’re doing. Inspection is key.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are talking with Mexican authorities, Ostlund said.

Ricardo Alday, a Mexican embassy spokesman in Washington, D.C., said Thursday that he was not familiar with the issue but would check into it.

Oregon harvests more Christmas trees than any other state, according to the National Christmas Tree Association. The state produces somewhere between 7 million and 8 million of the trees a year, Ostlund said.

Mexico buys about 1 million of those trees for an estimated $20 million, Ostlund said. About a quarter of Oregon’s Douglas-fir Christmas trees go to Mexico, he said.

Mexico has been trying to get its own Christmas-tree industry off the ground, planting a Doug-fir variant in hills outside the capital. So far, Mexican growers fall far short of supplying the nation’s needs.

Last year, Ostlund said, Oregon trees crossed the border just fine but often ran afoul of aggressive local inspectors, who held up tens of thousands at a time, increasing business costs and headaches.

“There was pretty much a big PR smear campaign about Northwest trees in the market,” he said.

Mexican authorities blamed needle midges and twig weevils, but Ostlund said those common pests are not serious threats. Inspectors ended up pulling only about 220 trees off the market.

Sharp, of the environmental growers group, said Oregon used to encounter similar problems with other U.S. states that cited insects and diseases in blocking Christmas trees. “We solved those problems,” said Sharp, an owner of Yule Tree Farms in Clackamas County.

Recently, Ostlund came across a document on the Internet that he found incriminating: a 2007 Mexican parliamentary committee resolution that called on officials to block Oregon trees to protect the local industry. Imports drain pesos, the resolution said, that Mexican growers could earn if they were able to produce more trees.

The resolution, signed by two dozen lawmakers, cited an earlier crackdown call by a Green Party member, who listed ecological benefits of growing Christmas trees in Mexico. It also claimed U.S. government subsidies exceeded Mexican government support, but Ostlund said growers here receive none.

“If I’d had this document prior to the 2007 shipping season,” Ostlund said, “I would have known exactly what we were dealing with.”

From the Oregonian