Info on relaxation of USDA import rules for seed
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 01 May 2004 22:36:34 PDT)

Dear All,

After reading through all of this it sounds like a different permit would
be required for each shipment of seed. So if say one of the members of this
list in another country wanted to send seed to one of us in the United
States we would have to ask for a permit for that seed by name and include
where it was coming from. If the permit were granted it would be sent to
the person along with labels for where to send the seed and then the seed
would be sent there to be inspected and if o.k. it would then be sent on to
the recipient. Is that the way everyone else interprets this? There would
be extra cost for postage to ask for the permit, to send the permit on to
the exporter if granted and then to pay for the seed to go for inspection
and then back to you. It sounds like for a seed exchange the person
receiving the seed would have to know ahead of time what it would be in
order to request the permit for each donor and a bit of a nightmare to do
all the paper work. Is this what Leo means by thinking the new system might
be worse than the old one?

Mary Sue