Canada’s Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau says potato exports can resume as soon as the U.S. reviews and approves data from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, according to a report by the CBC. “From the beginning we believe this was a serious phytosanitary issue,” the Minister says. “And we believed it would be solved through science. … We had this meeting with secretary Vilsack, and I think he clearly understood the sensitivity of the issue, and clearly directed the head of APHIS to proceed as prodigiously as possible with analysis of table potatoes to the mainland at first… So we are very hopeful that our Canadian are very confident that table stock potatoes can be exported with very negligible risk. So, we are hopeful to open the market for table stock potatoes within a week, she said.

Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) potato growers in Canada reacted with relief and optimism to news out of Washington Thursday that an end to the export ban to the United States is in sight. Canada’s agriculture minister said she’s optimistic that shipments of Island potatoes will start to head to Puerto Rico within two weeks, and the mainland states shortly after that.

Truckloads of Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) potatoes have started to arrive at food banks across Canada, part of an effort to distribute potatoes left sitting in Island warehouses because of the 10-week ban on exports to the United States. As Nancy Russell reports for CBC News, the P.E.I. Potato Board is helping to co-ordinate the shipments, along with two of the country’s largest food bank organizations, with funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Mike Nabuurs, P. Ag., of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is a commercial and agri-business manager with one of the big five chartered banks and a past executive director of the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture. He wrote an op-ed piece on the potato wart ban in Prince Edward Island that was published by Saltwire today – here is a brief excerpt.

Potato importers in Puerto Rico say they are not able to fill their orders to supermarkets on the Caribbean island because they can’t get enough supply to fill the void created by the export ban on Prince Edward Island potatoes. “We are in a bad, bad situation right now,” said Mark Antunez, president of Antunez & Son Produce, who has been importing from P.E.I. since 1988.

The P.E.I. Potato Board says the federal government should reduce the scope of a ministerial order restricting the movement of Island potatoes across Canada while a ban on exports of such potatoes to the U.S. remains in place. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) met with its American counterpart, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency, as part of a regular technical discussion on how to find a resolution to the ban.

Farmers on Prince Edward Island say there’s no justification for a suspension of exports of Island potatoes to the United States and it needs to be lifted now, but Canadian officials say the U.S. is demanding more information. “It’s our own government that has the suspension in place. We need that suspension lifted,” P.E.I. Potato Board general manager Greg Donald said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s no science that says our fresh potatoes cannot go.”

Canadian and U.S. officials are scheduled to meet this week to see if progress can be made to end a dispute that resulted in Canada suspending all shipments of potatoes from Prince Edward Island to the United States. Officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) will meet virtually with their American counterparts on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing trade dispute between Canada and the United States involving potatoes from Prince Edward Island.

CBC News reports that more than 100 potato growers from across Prince Edward Island in Canada met virtually Friday with the Island’s four members of Parliament to discuss the ongoing potato wart crisis and what federal politicians can do to get the U.S. border reopened to fresh potatoes.