When fire ants, a notoriously invasive stinging pest, appeared in Bermuda last year, officials from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources swung into action to contain the threat.

Not quickly enough, however, according to the island’s former consultant agronomist, who said local authorities dragged their feet on clearing the strongest poisons needed to stamp out the problem.

“It had to go through DENR in Bermuda, then the health department analysis, before they could bring it in,” Stewart Swanson, a United States expert on agricultural science, told The Royal Gazette.

“I think it took a couple of months. In the meantime, what are the ants doing? It’s inefficient.”

Fire ants have been acknowledged globally as a concern in countries ranging from the US to China and Australia. When it came to Bermuda, Mr Swanson said they should have been dealt with as a matter of urgency.

In discussing the island’s heavily bureaucratic and test-laden system governing agricultural imports, Mr Swanson pointed to another recent case, a rogue rattlesnake, first spotted last month in Southampton, which still has not been caught.

“It’s justifiable,” he said of the island’s wary approach. “But it shows how stuff has a way of getting through, whether you want it or not.”

Mr Swanson’s remarks came as a source familiar with DENR procedure, who asked not to be named, pointed to the island’s recent brush with another pest: mealy bugs, a scale insect that struck banana imports back in 2020.

While Bermuda kept the bugs at bay, the source said overly zealous and unnecessary testing at the DENR continue to ramp up the price of the imported fruit years on.

Asked if the island was too bureaucratic, Mr Swanson said: “There’s no doubt.”

In the case of the fire ant poison, he pointed to its Environmental Protection Agency clearance in the US, which should have allowed its “immediate” use here.

He added: “In the US, the EPA has Section 18, for emergency exemption. The idea is that the EPA has an avenue set up to react quickly. There’s nothing like that in Bermuda.”

Mr Swanson, who has worked with agriculture in Bermuda since the 1990s and finished his latest contract in March, said he would “just be in awe” at the volume of cases he witnessed visiting the DENR’s plant-testing laboratory.

“There are thousands of different types of plant-based materials that have been confiscated, that are there for testing or need to be looked at. It’s mind-boggling.”

He described the department as “overworked and understaffed”, but admitted that part of his reason for not seeking to renew his contract this year had been sheer frustration at the pace of getting things done.

“The majority of that frustration is that part of my job description is to try to bring new technology and new techniques to the farmers in Bermuda,” he said.

He cited the island’s reluctance to embrace the use of drones for targeted pesticide application as one of his disappointments.

“Politically, culturally and emotionally, the Government and the public are pretty reticent.”

Another impediment that “surprised” him on his latest assignment to Bermuda, from February 2023 to the end of March 2026, was the requirement for a “go-between” when it came to speaking out.

“You can’t just talk to the press,” Mr Swanson said, contrasting Bermuda’s culture of silence with the liberal public access to information in his home state of Florida.

He added: “I thought it was very strange that Bermuda wasn’t that way.”

Asked about other roadblocks, Mr Swanson gave two examples: peaches and sweet potatoes.

Peaches can be temperamental when it comes to producing fruit in hot climates.

Mr Swanson said there were varieties being used in Florida that showed promise for conditions in Bermuda, and that he wanted to bring in clippings that could be grafted on to local trees for testing.

“I wasn’t able to get it approved,” he said.

In the case of sweet potatoes, Bermudian farmers have to contend with a plant virus that builds up in local crops after a few harvests.

Fresh “slips” of the plant, brought in from overseas, help farmers maintain disease-free fields of a crop that grows typically well on the island.

However, Mr Swanson said farmers in Bermuda faced “a lot of frustration” bringing sweet potato slips in, when there were simple techniques such as irradiation for eliminating stowaway pests.

He gave the example of Bermudian farmer Tom Wadson, whose daughter ultimately had to fly to Louisiana to obtain slips from a reputable source but faced a “very expensive and time-consuming” delay in getting them cleared, during which time the plants could have died.

Mr Wadson shared his frustration. He said: “It worked. It only took me about 25 years getting there.”

Mr Swanson agreed that part of Bermuda’s reticence may come from the national disaster of the scale insect blight, which obliterated almost all of the island’s endemic cedar forest in the 1940s and 1950s.

He said: “I think so. I love Bermudians and one of the things I liked about living in Bermuda in the Nineties was how it’s a microcosm of the world. It’s so isolated.

“Bermudians are protective of what they have.”

The aim of bringing Mr Swanson back to the island was for a Bermudian to train up alongside him. A public access to information request showed that nine applicants for the trainee post put their names forward as of February 2024.

A Bermudian, Omari Dill, came through as the preferred candidate and signed on — but the DENR said he had handed in his notice that same year because he had “an opportunity for a higher-paid job”.

However, the Gazette understands that Mr Dill remains in line to take on the post full-time — although requests last week to the department for confirmation went unanswered.

In the meantime, a new agronomist, Gene McAvoy, has been hired.

Mr McAvoy e-mailed the island’s farming community last month to introduce himself, stating that his goal was a simple one: “ … to serve as a resource and partner in helping farmers succeed”.

Carlos Amaral, the Bermuda Farmers Association president, echoed Mr Swanson’s frustrations with importation.

Mr Amaral said: “There needs to be a compromise, where protectionism doesn’t take priority over production.”

He said farmers other than Mr Wadson had given up on trying to bring in products such as sweet potato slips to sustain their harvest because the barriers made it “futile”.

“Anytime we as growers or importers approach suppliers in the US, they look at all these requirements and tell us, we want to help — but the juice is not worth the squeeze.”

He added: “The reality, as we’ve seen with the rattlesnake, is that anything can get into Bermuda by any means, despite having these stringent, almost draconian requirements. We don’t live in a vacuum.”

Mr Amaral questioned how talk of boosting the island’s food security through full Caricom membership would ever make it through the red tape.

He said: “If the Government is keen on food security, let’s have a Cabinet mandate to get it done.”

Further questions were put to the environment and natural resources department about some of the points raised in this article but they were not answered by the time of publication.