PUKALANI, Maui — Plant quarantine officials said last week that laying off more than half the state's agricultural inspectors would create such a logjam at Hawai'i ports that it could cause shortages similar to those seen during shipping strikes.

Carol Okada, manager of the Hawai'i Department of Agriculture's Plant Quarantine Branch, said she has not been able to develop a plan for how her department will continue its core functions after it loses 52 employees, 50 of them inspectors, to layoffs planned for November.

She said food shipments to Maui and the other Neighbor Islands, which because of staff shortages would now have to be routed through Honolulu for inspection, would have to sit on the docks until the state's remaining inspectors could look at them, with the risk that some food could spoil in the unchilled containers.

She said the staffing cuts were so unprecedented that she had no way of predicting how long the delays would be.

"There's such a reliance on imports," she said last week. "When this is impacted, it's just like having a dock strike, but in Hawai'i it's a shutdown."

The plant quarantine branch would lose 46 percent of its total staff in the layoffs, and 54 percent of its agricultural inspectors. On Maui, six of the current 17 inspector positions would be cut. Of the remaining 11 positions, six are paid for by the state Department of Transportation to work only at Kahului Airport.

Russell Pang, spokesman for Gov. Linda Lingle, said the state administration knew that the Department of Agriculture had many positions that would be cut in the layoffs and was aware of what the effects of those cuts would be.

He said that Lingle had to target positions paid for out of the state's general fund to balance the budget. That meant certain agencies, like the Department of Agriculture, took a bigger hit than departments whose budgets are drawn from special funds, he said.

A major question for the Plant Quarantine Branch remains how to prioritize once it no longer has enough personnel to carry out all its former responsibilities.

Okada said she assumed only that inspectors would implement a "food first" policy, prioritizing checks of imported food over all other duties. But she said she needed more direction from the state administration on how to implement that policy.

Unanswered questions included which containers should be checked first when inspectors can't get to them all, and whether shipping containers that inspectors simply don't have time to open should be allowed into the state unchecked, or rejected and sent back to where they came from.

"There hasn't been any guidance," Okada said in an interview at the state Department of Agriculture offices in Kahului. "We're waiting."

The branch is tasked with inspecting all imports of produce; live fish, shellfish, birds and small pets; plants; cut flowers; seeds and animal feed; and intercepting stowaway pests from snakes to ants — anything that could pose a threat to people, local crops or the environment.

With its remaining inspectors focused on food imports, the Plant Quarantine Branch will end some of its other services, including its self-certification program, which allows growers to ship nursery plants and cut flowers directly to the Mainland.

Maui has 25 plant nurseries that rely on the self-certification program.

"Their businesses will become very vulnerable," Okada said. "To sell only within Hawai'i, it's too small a market."

She also said inspections of exports from Hawai'i will likely become a lower priority under the "food first" policy.

That could put Hawai'i farmers who ship crops to California at risk. The state has already been put on notice by California and federal officials that too many pests have been found in shipments from Hawai'i, and warned that if the situation is not corrected, the Golden State could ban all Hawai'i agricultural products.