In 2007 I crossed the border on bus going from Montreal to NY. The girl I was travelling with was accused of illegal importation of fruits because she was carrying an apple for the trip.
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It might seem silly to you but I think that the import controls to protect domestic agriculture make sense and preventing unintentional/incidental imports like this one is an important part of CBP's job.
They should spend more time on this and less time on rejecting visitors to the US.
Unfortunately government employees can be remarkably bureaucratic and power trip. They should quarantine or destroy incidental contraband like individual apples and let people get on with their business.
> It might seem silly to you
No, it IS silly. People carry little bits of food with them to eat while traveling, they've been doing that as long as there have been people.
Clearly this has nothing to do with importing apples at a level with which the border patrol needs to be concerned, it's just some lowlife official flexing his/her muscle.
It is not silly. People carry necesities of life while traveling, but there have been deadly plages since there has been long distance traveling too.
It is imposible to know in advance everything any traveler might have on their person at the time of crossing the border, so everything that is not explicitly whitelisted should not be forbidden by default; and it is travelers duty to know the list of permitted things well in advance. It this is not the case right now, it means airlines and travel agencies are externalizing the cost of educating their customers, and this is reflected in the form of needless risks to public health.
I don't know you, but I would hate to be a farmer that looses the family's apple orchard to a foreign parasite that got introduced by some dumb tourist, just because the fat-cat air industy need to sale cheap tickets to anyone with a pulse and cannot afford to send a damned brochure to the buyers' address.
Yes, we all would hate to be that farmer, unfortunately for you that farmer as far as we know does not exist and is a hypothetical. There are as far as I know no pests that exist North of the border that do not exist South of it (though the reverse does occasionally happen).
Of course all the good little boys and girls will only eat apples locally grown to make sure such terrible dangers will not befall the local farmers and to avoid 'needless risks to public health'.
It is more complex than that.
It is obvious to you that apples cannot bring any pests. Last time I checked you were an IT professional, not an epidemiologist; so please forgive me if I am skeptical of you abilities to judge whether the assertation up there is true or not. Actually, I am skeptical of the abilities of the average tourist to judge whether the thing they are already biased to do for their own comfort is against the public good or not.
But anyways... we were talking apples, what about oranges? What about pets? Do we really need to go through the list of all possible things that all possible travelers might think they are entitled to carry on their person? Wouldn't you agree that a rule that is not simple enough to be executed by your random clerk is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable?
So, even if apples are sort of OK to bring in, they still should be banned until it is throughly demonstrated that they are OK to bring in. And the resources needed for that through demonstration can only happen if enough people want to bring those apples (and maybe pay a customs fare for it).
Hilarious.
I can take an apple from where I'm sitting to the Turkish border 2000+ km away without anybody batting an eye but somehow miraculously an apple in the possession of a traveler from Canada to the USA or the other way around is a huge danger.
As for me being an IT professional: yes, that's my main occupation. But besides that I have a rather wide interest (as in pretty much anything that I can read that I can get my hands on) and have also lived on the Canadian/US border.
And the thing that I recall is that every so often the USA would come up with some trumped-up reason to declare Canadian products/produce/whatever to be so dangerous that they could not possible cross the border any more, and more often than not (in fact, pretty much all the cases) were simply protectionism under the guise of safety.
Fearmongering in the name of commerce, what else is new?
Is a much more complex problem than this.
1) Buy a Tesla car an send it hidden to China. 2) Take a Tesla car in China an send it to USA.
Both are totally different cases
Apples not only can carry diseases, they have an economical value also and this value can be surprisingly huge. The american apple sector means more than 3 billions of dollars each year. New fancy varieties supported by research and heavy marketing can represent a big chunk of this and have a strict copyright. This protected varieties can't be cloned or exported without a license of the company. Losing the control and exclusivity over your product valued in several million dollars is all except hilarious.
http://jenny.tfrec.wsu.edu/opm/displaySpecies.php?pn=140
They're not asking about fruit because they're worried you may sell that single apple and drive a farmer out of business. The spread of agricultural pests and diseases is a major problem.
Of course that apple will end up carrying a scary agricultural pest from Canada to the USA.
Really, this is totally over the top. It's not like we're talking about a an apple that you couldn't buy on either side of the border without any differences whatsoever.
And it could easily be that that apple was produced in the USA to begin with (or further South).
From a pest spreading perspective this makes no sense.
Going through the Southern barricade on foot I could see the point, going from Canada into the USA by bus with an apple it makes zero sense, especially since the pest you so helpfully linked here is widespread on both sides of the border anyway, besides the fact that it was extremely unlikely to carry that particular pest since it was sold as fit for consumption.
Or did you feel that because it came from Canada that there was some terrible risk that would not have been present had it come from any one of the other 49 states?
Are you arguing that agricultural controls at land border crossings are ineffectual and should be dismantled?
That seems to go against (what appears to be) global scientific consensus that controls like these are helpful in slowing the spread of invasive species.
Or are you just arguing there should be exemptions for small amounts?
I am arguing that if there is no clear danger one should not go overboard, proportionality is what matters.
The USA and Canada are to all intents and purposes one when it comes to this kind of control. There are some borders that have been constructed with a biological air-gap in mind but that's not one of them.
This is one of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap
And it is effective because it is both deep and there are no easy ways around it.
I've visited places where there was definite risk of contamination and there are plenty of historic examples (of whole continents, for that matter, such as Australia) where eco-systems were upset by bringing in pests, diseases, new predators or animals without local predators so I'm well aware of the risk.
But border guards going overboard because of an apple makes zero sense to me, it is an over-reaction to something that is not a threat.
Yes, hypothetically you might be able to find a path through which a new disease might spread from one country to another because of a single apple. But since we allow animals to freely roam the Canadian/US border at will, since all the diseases that might affect your apple orchard as far as I'm aware are spread on both sides of the border since as long as we can remember in most cases and since that apple could have easily been inspected on carrying some kind of scary insect (which likely wasn't present or the owner would not have brought it) and everything else it might carry (some kind of blight) would likely not be carried past the point where it would survive normal indigestion and disposal the risk is so vanishingly small that it becomes a display of power rather than something useful.
Case in point: The many apples that I've carried from one side of the border to the other without so much as a batted eye. It's either consistent enforcement or you might as well not enforce at all and I highly doubt the US/Canadian border is so well established that it would not be possible to carry truckloads of apples across if one were so inclined.
Not all of the border is patrolled, even though you might believe other wise.
When the pig disease fear was in full swing the measures were laughably inefficient and inconsistent, and that was an actual threat with serious risk of contagion.
West Nile is another nice example: Mosquitoes don't see that imaginary line we call a border. Same with ant species, beetles and other big time destroyers of lives or crops.
Having the border patrol confiscate apples might sell a few more apples South of the border and it might give the official a boner but it isn't going to achieve much to keep a country safer, rather the opposite, it's going to cause people to find creative ways to get their stuff across the border with the chance that someone does smuggle a box with seed potatoes carrying blight across un-noticed.
And that would be a problem. An apple clearly intended for consumption is no more dangerous than any other item intended for consumption including sandwiches, liquids and so on.
If you're going to forbid apples you might as well forbid those otherwise it is inconsistent.
Sounds to me like you have a problem with the over-zealous enforcement of the rule, rather than the rule itself.
While I agree the enforcement can be over-zealous (I've seen it first hand), I think if it wasn't produce it would just be something else they'd nitpick. It's the mentality of the guards that's the problem.
And what type of system would you propose as an alternative? A threshold based on actual risk? Well then every type of produce is going to have different limits. And what about different sub-species of the same fruit? If Macintosh apples are a bigger risk than Red Delicious, surely they should have different limits. It's only fair. Now you're counting on a traveller (and border guard) to be able to know the difference between a myriad list of produce types. Good luck with that.
I'd argue, that such a system would lead to slower crossings, higher costs, and less focus on more important matters like security threats. The rule itself may be extreme but makes a lot of sense in the context of processing millions of travellers efficiently.
Just as with software, simple, easy to understand paradigms are usually better.
>If you're going to forbid apples you might as well forbid those otherwise it is inconsistent.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. In the interest of balancing risk and expediency "no produce allowed" seems like a perfectly reasonable rule to me. Even children can understand it. Heck, even non-English speakers could be made to understand it with some well designed signage.
Anyways, there are way bigger issues with border crossing rules and procedures. It just seems like an odd issue to be so passionate about in this day and age.
Well put. Thank you. Absolutely crazy to think sending someone back because of an apple is in any way justifiable between two countries with such a long shared border.
The problem is that an apple carrying a new disease across the frontier can be the difference between having millions of loses in agriculture or not. Believe it or not, their economic impact is far much worse than carrying a bag of drugs or a bomb. The solution is easy in any case.
What happened to her?
Not your parent commenter, but I was on a bus once from Toronto to NYC. One of my fellow passengers had a coconut confiscated at the border. We all felt sorry for him, but when he got back on the bus, he pulled out a second coconut from his coat. :)
More interesting, my neighbor on that bus ride did not possess a passport nor even a photo ID! He was Amish and had no problems crossing the border. His papers (which I examined) included a handwritten description of his appearance.
A minor delay and a confiscated piece of fruit, most likely.
Yes, that was it.