Thanks Robin, In all honesty we do realize that the import system is not reflective of the modern processes. That being said we can not petition congress for change. We can amend the CFRs, and that is a very long process. The US system is great for transparency but can get bogged down with the need to appease as much of the population as possible. Public disclosure, forums & feedback help to keep us on track but this takes time and there is the ever looming problem that government needs to be smaller. Thus international agreements and making our regulations comparable to other countries becomes a slower process. For the plants for planting universe there are changes in the works. Some groups want to totally ban plant imports for reasons of fear to environmental pollution of the N. American biomes. http://www.invasive.org/gist/learnmore.html Where others think the government is too restrictive and all imports should be at the discretion of the individual. We try to find a balance. As I mentioned before the Hatch Act prohibits government employees from advocating change to elected official. But groups like this when organized can contact the Secretary of Agriculture directly with requests, recommendations and (most often) complaints. We do listen and try to find a balance and we try to help as much as we can within the limits of the CFR. For more information go to the PPQ website to be included in the stakeholder registry https://web01.aphis.usda.gov/PPQStakeWeb2.nsf there are a couple of presentations that may be useful too. UNITED STATES of AMERICA (716Kb) - Regulations Affecting Seed ... New information is added to the website from the NAPPRA rule (http://aphis.usda.gov/import_export/plants/… ) to Federal Orders that are the precursor to changing the CFR: http://aphis.usda.gov/import_export/plants/… I do hope this helps. Bill