Seeds and nests test biosecurity
Reports on staffing issues as mail volumes from China soar.
Online shopping is feeding the growing flood of mail from China, and illegal imports of seeds and edible bird nests are proving a problem.
The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) said mail from China had trebled in the past two years to 4.5 million items annually, and this year it had overtaken the United Kingdom and Australia as the single largest source of overseas mail.
Stuart Rawnsley is MPI’s biosecurity manager at the international mail processing centre in Auckland. He said an extra five staff were needed to cope with the sheer volume of packets and parcels arising from sales through the likes of TMall and AliExpress.
‘‘The needles we’re looking for are in a much bigger haystack and they take a lot more time to sift through.’’
Online purchases from China ranged from cosmetics and electronics to fishing equipment.
Of more than 60 million mail items entering New Zealand each year, about 50,000 are taken aside for close inspection. Of the 10,500 seized, about half are seeds.
Rawnsley said Kiwis had imported seeds for many years, but some seeds sourced online from China were from less reputable suppliers.
‘‘Because you can buy 100 rose seeds for 20 cents and get it delivered free, people will often tack that kind of stuff onto their order. Sometimes they get rose seeds, sometimes they get other seeds and sometimes bits of dirt.’’
MPI was also also concerned at the increase in seizures of edible bird nests – 34 so far this year. The nests, made from the solidified saliva of swifts, are valued by Asian cultures for making bird’s nest soup, and some nests had been falsely declared as cookies or vermicelli.
Rawnsley said they fetched $2500 to $10,000 a kilogram depending on quality, and although MPI had previously allowed the reshipment of undeclared nests, they were now destroyed.
‘‘We’re being bombarded with people deliberately trying to get them in and we want to deter that, so every time they try to have a crack, they’re losing thousands of dollars.’’
Because China Post was swamped, some Chinese exporters trans-shipped goods to other countries and used their postal systems to get them to New Zealand, Rawnsley said.
‘‘We were getting a couple of hundred items from Mauritius; now we’re getting tens of thousands. The European country of choice for that is Bulgaria.’’
MPI is approaching marketers and e-commerce platforms to try to stop the sale of banned goods at the source – ‘‘so that people cannot even buy them, or when they click on them, they’ll be told they can’t bring them in’’.
Rawnsley said the ministry was also looking at making processing more efficient by extending a trusted trader system that allowed low-risk goods to bypass the mail centre.
A trial with three Australian apparel companies could be extended to other countries and businesses with information on goods provided, screened and cleared electronically.
‘‘The idea is to get it out of the way of the real work we have to do,’’ he said.