Originally Posted by
svhar
This could only happen in the USA. The rest of the world has commom sense.
You need to travel a bit more if you truly believe this, and you'll find that the U.S. is actually less stringent that some when it comes to declaring items, what needs to be declared, and the penalties for not doing so. Australia is well known for it's stringent declaration requirements and penalties. Not only for fruits and vegetables, but all food. Wood items are also included. For instance, if you buy a souvenir made or partially made from wood, it falls under this...
Got that?....Declaring the item is a "Must Do", no matter what the person believes about the item. Same for the lady in the U.S. with the apple...declaring is a "Must Do". Of course, unlike the U.S. the entire cabin of an aircraft going into Australia will have to be sprayed to comply with their Disinsection requirements, along with proof, signed forms, including the lot number of the cans sprayed, and if you're traveling within Australia internal checks and controls are common as well. For instance, if you buy fruit...say, bananas from the Philippines... at a grocery store in one part of the country you may not be able to bring it into another, it'll be confiscated. When you go to a grocery store at your destination to replace your bananas, you may end up buying new ones grown and imported from the same Philippine banana plantation as the ones they just confiscated.
Don't think it's much more lenient in NZ. Try to bring some honey on a sandwich into NZ, and animal importation and quarantine rules are just as severe and inflexible as Australia. When Christchurch was hit with the earthquake a few years ago and search and rescue teams that specialize in rubble rescue from the U.S. and Japan were dispatched with their heavy equipment to help find those missing and buried that might have been alive, New Zealand ordered those teams to leave one of there most valuable assets.. their highly- trained, human-sniffing dogs who's specialty is to find people buried under rubble....behind because NZ would not waive their animal quarantine rules, not even with lives at stake.
Japan is another country where they take their Agricultural importation rules extremely seriously. If you arrive at a Japanese airport with no garbage incinerator set up for international trash, all the trash on the aircraft will have to remain and be locked-up on the aircraft, and flown out when the aircraft departs. Being fined for ignoring their rules is common, woe to anyone not declaring what they should, it will come as no surprise.
But the one thing all countries who have rules banning and declaring agricultural good and animals will tell you, they are common sense. Invasive species cost the agricultural industries billions and no controls or enforcement wind up wiping out native plant and animal species. And in every one of those countries there are penalties for disregarding the rules, and every day people get penalized for disregarding them. Just because you're not seeing it on TV or isn't reported by the BBC parroting the latest US media nonsense doesn't mean it isn't happening.