Wholesalers worry that new security checks will spoil food USA Today

Wholesalers worry that new security checks will spoil food USA Today

Fruit, vegetable and seafood wholesalers are worried that their perishables will spoil at airports next year because of a new security law requiring crates of goods to be checked for bombs before going on passenger airplanes.

Boxes of fresh food could sit in airport warehouses for hours, losing freshness and potentially facing unsanitary conditions while cargo handlers stack them up and test for bombs, said Chris Connell of Commodity Forwarders, which transports perishables.

"You could have people putting their hands in strawberry cases looking for explosives," Connell said.

Harvey Waite of transporter Oceanair said he worries airport warehouses will become so backed up that "they'll have to shut their doors because they won't be able to keep up with screening."

The Transportation Security Administration is phasing in a 2007 law requiring freight to be screened before going in the belly of a passenger plane with suitcases. U.S. passenger planes carry 12 million pounds a day of freight ranging fish to computers.

TSA Assistant Administrator John Sammon said "it's possible" that the screening requirement could lead to delays getting freight on passenger planes.

Some freight is now being screened, but a big test comes in January. That's when goods being hauled out of Alaska and Hawaii on passenger planes must undergo screening.

Alaska's fishing industry, which produces nearly 60% of domestic seafood, is bracing for bottlenecks, said Jan Koslosky of Ocean Beauty Seafoods, which has seven fish-processing plants in Alaska. "There's absolutely no way all this cargo can be screened at the airport," Koslosky said.

The law worries producers because the TSA will not be doing the screening. Although TSA workers have been scanning luggage since 2002, the agency is putting the responsibility for cargo on private companies, which it will certify and oversee.

Airlines and cargo handlers are buying screening equipment to perform bomb scans in their warehouses. But Sammon said those companies can't handle all the freight in a timely way.

The agency is urging manufacturers and distributors to join a new program that lets them satisfy the screening requirement if they impose strict security rules, such as employee background checks.

Alaska seafood processors are slowly signing up for the program. But Koslosky said she worries that when the massive and lucrative salmon harvest begins in May, there will be inadequate screening capacity, and 50-pound boxes of the fish piling up in storage.