One of the major areas of focus for the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas in Nogales, AZ, year after year, has been dealing with various issues affecting the logistics of getting produce from the growing areas in Mexico across the border and into the warehouses in Nogales in a timely and expeditious manner. Nearly every season, the industry has faced delays and backlogs due to a myriad of causes, ranging from inadequate highway and port infrastructure to inadequate staffing at the port and inadequately equipped military checkpoints along the highway in Mexico approaching the port.

Significant progress has been made in many of these areas over the last two or three years, and coming into the 2014 Sonora grape season, it appeared that at last “we have all of our logistical ducks in a row,” said Allison Moore, director of legislative and regulatory affairs for the FPAA in an interview with The Produce News April 7.

“We have a great infrastructure in place now with our port for crossing grapes,” she said. The new, expanded port facility, which has been under construction for several years, is now nearly complete, and the commercial portion, consisting of eight lanes, is now “fully operational,” she said. Having eight operational cargo lanes, double what the old port facility had, “is amazing.”

Among other things, the new port has improved truck dock facilities at the port to facilitate inspections when offloading is necessary.

Adequate staffing to operate the expanded facility has been a great concern to the association, but a major victory has been achieved in that regard as well. CBP will be getting 2,000 additional officers, “and we are hearing, for sure, that Arizona is going to be getting 170 officers,” Moore said. While they will not be in place for the current grape season, they should be by the next Nogales winter vegetable season, when traffic is heaviest, and that “is definitely an important part of enhancing our port.”

Along with the completed dock spaces for agricultural inspections, the Arizona Department of Agriculture, which does the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections, is “powered up and ready for their expectations for the grape season,” Moore said. “So I think this year looks like a really good year.”

In Nogales, there is a new cold storage facility that has been built by Grupo Alta specifically for grapes, Moore said. That is in addition to several other facilities in town that are “absolutely designed for efficient handling of grapes,” although some of them also handle vegetables through the winter. “They are all getting geared up for grape season.”

Any additional warehouse space that is built in Nogales with grapes in mind helps the whole deal, Moore said. Even if it is used exclusively by a single shipper, “it would open up space in another facility” that shipper might have been using before, adding to the available square footage of space designed to handle grapes and improving the efficiency for the industry as a whole.