The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Periodic infestations of medflies cripple harvests, forcing growers to shut down production as inspectors seek to eliminate the insects. Medflies, which lay their eggs under the rind of ripening fruit, cause spoilage, deformities, lowered crop yields and premature fruit drops. They also make fruits subject to export sanctions. Their ongoing presence in Hawaii has wreaked havoc on the state’s fruit industry.

  Pest concerns are taken seriously. USDA officials conducting a routine search of Dawn Princess, a cruise ship docked at the port of Los Angeles, recently found dozens of mangoes swarming with live fruit flies. In the early 1990s, two air cargo containers full of illegal Thai fruits covered in pests were seized in California with an estimated street value of 250,000 dollars. When that border agent asks you to hand over your oranges, he or she won’t be eating them. Seized goods are ground up, trashed, burned, autoclaved, buried in landfills or whisked away to oblivion by haulers licensed to transport medical waste.

  Because of the hazards involved, it’s guilty until proven innocent in the produce world. Substantiating a fruit’s safety is a costly process that requires years of research. Smuggling fills the void. Nobody knows exactly how much the global fruit black market generates, but the worldwide underground trade in protected flora and fauna generates an estimated 6 to 10 billion dollars annually.

  Without fruit flies, importing fruits would be easier. Even though free trade agreements have eliminated many tariffs and other trade obstacles, unfounded phytosanitary concerns are often cited as a carte blanche to bar the import of foreign products. For cases when fruits genuinely harbor pests that could endanger domestic crops, these measures are vitally important. But in countless other instances, they are merely a way of blocking import from developing nations.

  The Millennium Development Goals of the World Trade Organization are intended to allow an easier flow of goods into developed nations. The WTO is finally catching on to the false sanitary exemptions, and has started enforcing a more scientific approach to nontariff barriers. Their overall objective is “to permit countries to take ‘legitimate’ measures to protect the life and health of their consumers (in relation to food safety matters), while prohibiting them from using those measures in a way that unjustifiably restricts trade.”

  A modern-day example of the complexities of getting fruits into North America and Europe can be seen in the saga of the Indian mango. There are over 1,100 varieties of mangoes. Some are the size of Ping-Pong balls, and others weigh over five pounds. All we usually get is a variety called Tommy Atkins, an early twentieth-century military term for a faceless soldier. It’s a fitting designation. Tommy Atkins mangoes are rugged, robust and fibrous warriors fit for the rigors of international commerce. They barely resemble delicious South Asian mango cultivars like the madhuduta (messenger of fragrance), kamang (embodiment of Cupid), kokilavasa (abode of cuckoos) and kamavallabha (the amorous). The most popular variety, the Alphonso, is the opposite of the Tommy Atkins: it boasts complex flavors, is fully fiberless and pools nectar to its surface when bitten. Peeled like an orange, it is eaten out of hand like a messy apple. For connoisseurs, the best part of eating an Alphonso is licking the juice off their fingers, hands and arms.

  Indian mangoes weren’t allowed into the United States for nearly thirty years, ostensibly due to pest concerns. The real reason was nuclear. India and Canada had signed treaties that provided India with CANDU nuclear reactors intended for civilian use. In 1974, it was discovered that the Canadian reactors were covertly being used to manufacture plutonium and build a nuclear arsenal. After breaking off their relations due to nonproliferation violations, Canada and India resumed nuclear trade in 1989—the year mangoes stopped coming into the United States. Every spring, crates of Alphonsos pour into Canada on British Airways cargo planes. I ate four boxes (forty-eight mangoes) in 2006. But I couldn’t have eaten any in the United States.

  That changed in 2007, following India’s new nuclear treaty with the United States. When Indian commerce minister Kamal Nath met with U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman to discuss a multibillion-dollar deal for the sale of civilian nuclear technology, mangoes were on the table. Nath assured Portman that the nuclear deal would be green-lit—on the condition that India’s mangoes be allowed back in. A few months later, President Bush flew into India to discuss the deal, announcing “the U.S. is looking forward to eating Indian mangoes.”

  Mango diplomacy, as the media have dubbed this phenomenon, demonstrates that the machinations of trade are a form of geopolitical tic-tac-toe. Any small grower trying to import pincushion fruits or ice cream beans would be mummified in red tape without well-placed insiders. Shipping fruits in accordance with phytosanitary regulations involves years of technical procedures and tests. These delays, which in the past were interminable, and hence another masquerade for protectionism, are now being monitored as part of the WTO’s imposed mea sures to limit nontariff barriers. This process will continue to require administrative delays for pest risk analysis and regulatory reviews, but in coming years, it will be harder to cite unwarranted phytosanitary concerns as a means of keeping out third-world imports, resulting in a greater assortment of exotic fruits on supermarket shelves.

  In the United States, these fruits will all be irradiated before entering the country. This requires that the exporting countries invest millions in inspection and irradiation facilities. Until recently, nuclear irradiation chambers were used to beam fruits and other foods with radioactive cobalt isotopes. Because of the consumer outcry (owners of fruit X-raying facilities were receiving death threats), a new technology has now been adopted called “electronic pasteurization.” These irradiation units are powered by electron beams derived from electricity, rather than nuclear by-products. It appears to be safe for human consumption, but opponents claim it is irradiation just dressed up: the chamber still pelts fruits with electrons traveling at the speed of light. Nonetheless, the process has rapidly been adopted all over the world. Brazil, touting itself as “the fruit basket of the world,” has built dozens of facilities. Electronic pasteurization prolongs shelf life and destroys microorganisms and small insects, while supposedly only slightly altering the fruits’ basic nutritional integrity.

  Until this technology was given the go-ahead in Hawaii in 2000, the rambutan wasn’t allowed into the United States. When it first arrived in New York City, entire shipments sold out within hours at high-end grocery stores. No one seemed to know—or care—that they had been electronically pasteurized. Even if they were labeled, the choice is between zapped rambutans or none at all.

  Another method is hot-water baths. Some exotic fruits imported into the United States spend four hours in saturated water vapor at 117.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Boiled, underripe mangoes: yum!

  Even after all the preventative measures, some fruits still harbor larvae. They are sent to fumigating chambers before being released to the wholesaler (who isn’t required to announce the fumigation). And because snakes, spiders and other beasties occasionally slither in with fruit shipments, holds are often gassed before unloading.

  Many Pacific Rim fruits cross into the United States from British Columbia, where there is no fruit-fly threat to Canada’s temperate crops. The demand for forbidden fruits ensures a high price, so the risks of smuggling them into the States can be seen as worthwhile, especially for shady produce sellers catering to newly emigrated customers desperate for a taste of home. In 1999, Tu Chin Lin spent five months in jail and five months in home confinement for smuggling contraband longans into Manhattan’s Chinatown. He was part of a fruit-rustling organization that obtained illicit fruit in Canada and smuggled truckloads of booty over the border by falsifying invoices and customs documents.

  The mangosteen, during its years on the lam, could occasionally be found in U.S. Chinatowns. When I’d unwittingly smuggled mango steens to Ossenfort in Manhattan, we scoffed at the idea of fruit smugglers. Little did we know the phenomenon is so widespread that Nintendo recently released a frui
t-smuggling video game called Bangai-O. Its premise is that the SF Kosmo gang has hijacked a shipment of intergalactic fruit, which they are selling at inflated prices. The player’s aim is to destroy this fearsome network of fruit pirates.

  Some countries have ever fiercer antismuggling laws. New Zealand stringently monitors fruit imports, as rockers Franz Ferdinand and actress Hilary Swank learned when, on separate occasions, they were fined for not declaring their apples and oranges. Thirty-four-year-old Chinese student Jian Lin was nabbed smuggling five mangoes and fifteen pounds of lychees into New Zealand. The fruits, which were not declared, showed up in an X-ray inspection of her luggage. Lin pleaded guilty to breaching the Biosecurity Act and was fined 1,000 dollars. The judge was lenient; the fine could have been 150,000 dollars.

  In 2004, a Japanese tour guide was fined thousands of dollars for smuggling eleven pounds of peaches into Australia. Other countries face distributors who smuggle as a means of bypassing tax charges. Syrian and Jordanian fruits are smuggled through Lebanese customs so they can be sold duty-free in markets. Rampant smuggling of fruits between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been countered with a zero-tariff free trade agreement. In July 2005, the Bangladesh Independent reported that vast quantities of mangoes, apples and grapes were being smuggled in by corrupt Bangladesh Rifles, a paramilitary force.

  In the United States, stiff new penalties are acting as a deterrent. The Fruit, Vegetable and Plant Smuggling Act of 2001 has resulted in felony sentences of up to five years incarceration and fines of 25,000 dollars. Repeat violators get up to ten years of imprisonment plus another fifty-thousand-dollar fine. Even minor smuggling acts are misdemeanor crimes punishable by a year in prison with fines of a thousand dollars and more for repeat offenders.

  Officials have started paying informers a percentage of the fine levied. Concerned parties can call a hotline if they have information about the smuggling of prohibited exotic fruits. In the United States, a number of different federal agents chase smugglers. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees an organization called Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ), as well as the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

  APHIS, in turn, has set up an antismuggling unit called the Smuggling, Interdiction and Trade Compliance (SITC). Its hundred employees, with an annual budget of 9 million dollars, conduct intensified cargo blitzes at U.S. ports every couple of weeks. Over sixty-eight tons of prohibited Asian fruit were seized in the organization’s first two years. Special agents at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently conducted a sting called Operation Botany that nabbed a ring of plant smugglers. Regional subdivisions include Closing the Los Angeles Marketplace Pathway (CLAMP) and Florida Interdiction and Smuggling Team (FIST). The FIST comes down hard, raiding suspicious greenhouses (like Richard Wilson’s Excalibur Nurseries) with attack dogs and machine guns.

  The process of importing and exporting fruits is an unceasing stream of forms, e-mails, faxes and other flotsam. This paperwork, which has increased greatly since 9/11, ensures that any fruit crossing a border can be traceable to its warehouse of origin, in case of any terrorist maneuver involving produce. The computerization of the shipping infrastructure has resulted in cargo being declared before trucks reach border checkpoints. New breeds of scanners have been developed to identify fruits and plants in baggage. The Beagle Brigade, a doggy inspection program manned by beagles with names like Liberty, patrols many U.S. airports.

  Another reason for the draconian crackdown on fruit smuggling in recent years is that massive quantities of drugs come into North America inside fruit shipments. In 1990, one inspector verified a shipment of 1,190 boxes of canned passion fruit; a tenth of them were full of narcotics. Notorious Colombian drug smuggler Alberto Orlandez-Gamboa shipped cocaine into New York inside banana skins. The Mexican drug cartel headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes brought in tons of drugs each month on fruit-carrying eighteen-wheelers and 727 airplanes (for which Fuentes became dubbed the “Lord of the Sky”). In November 2004, a shipment of Hit Fruit Drink cartons containing 1.7 million dollars’ worth of liquefied heroin was seized in Miami. A disheartened health-food store employee told me that his rich bosses had been moving ayahuasca and cocaine out of the jungle in shipments of dried fruits. Convicted smuggler Richard Stratton brought fifteen tons of Middle Eastern hash into America inside cartons of dates.

  An Australian-Colombian banana importer was arrested in 2003 after 35 million dollars’ worth of cocaine was found stashed in banana crates. Officers raiding his office at Kristel Foods found another 9 million dollars in cash. Seven Chiquita banana ships were stopped in 1997 containing more than a ton of cocaine. Another fruit industry professional in Montreal told me that almost all the city’s drugs arrive sewn up in fruits. Even though fruits are tracked and documented at every transfer point, it remains impossible to search more than a small fraction of the cargo. “You think they’re going to open every box of mangoes at every border?” he said. “Anyways, everybody’s getting greased. Customs guys get thirty thousand dollars in brown envelopes to let a truck through. That’s how much they make a year. You think anybody’s saying anything? If someone does get nailed, they’ll blame the guy at the loading docks. They’ll say his cousin in Honduras sent it.”

  In the summer of 2007, police uncovered 38 million dollars’ worth of cocaine at the port of Montreal. When I heard the report on the radio, I turned up the volume, certain that fruits were implicated. Sure enough, the drugs were found in buckets of frozen mango pulp.

  Fruit trucks are also used to smuggle human immigrants. In 2007, immigration agents in Huixtla, Mexico, were tipped off by the smell of human sweat when searching an eighteen-wheeler full of bananas. They found ninety-four people hiding among the fruit crates. The bust revealed that Carlos César Ferrera, “King of the Trailers,” had been overseeing a network of hundreds of trucks carrying human cargo. Ferrera would approach truckers and ask whether, for a fee of five thousand to ten thousand dollars they’d be willing to carry what he called a “heavier load of bananas.”

  THE MAJORITY OF smugglers don’t know they’re smugglers. “Individuals bring back fruit for sentimental reasons,” says Allen Clark of the Pest Exclusion Branch of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “The profit motive is rarely involved and the activity takes place on a very small scale.” At meetings held by the USDA to develop a two-way dialogue, new immigrants caught with fruits are educated on the risks of smuggling. The organizers have noted complaints that fruits don’t taste good in the United States. Immigrants want to bring their tastier native fruits into America. Some of the attendees have asked whether it would help to wrap their fruits in cellophane before bringing them in. The USDA officials duly inform them that doing so still entails an act of smuggling that can land them tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

  Some people will invariably continue to smuggle in a taste of home. There also exists a subset of conservationists who, fully aware of the rules they are breaking, smuggle for botanical reasons. For them, disseminating rare plant materials is a way of expanding a fruit’s reach, of facilitating the dispersal of plants that might otherwise be faced with extinction.

  Others, like Morimoto and his Japanese citrus clippings, smuggle for exclusive germplasm. The payoff can be quite lucrative: the 245 acerola seeds smuggled out of Puerto Rico in 1956 have blossomed into a major crop in Brazil. The seeds of a popular New Zealand citrus variety, the Lemonade fruit, are said to have entered the United States “informally.” There are many ways to move contraband plants. One informal method is to falsify export permits. Voon Boon Hoe told me that many people simply mislabel the contents of their packages, saying they contain legal plants when they really contain all sorts of endangered jungle fruits. “The officials don’t know the difference,” he said. “If anybody asks you, you say, ‘Oops—I thought that’s what its name was.’” Another method is to
use decoys. Smugglers will put a legit plant specimen in the shipping container, get the permit, and then switch the plants. Declaring a mundane fruit—apples, say—can also act as a distraction for something more controversial—such as a coco-de-mer. Perhaps the simplest recourse is to avoid declaring any seeds or cuttings.

  That’s how one California fruit grower brought home a rare variety of golden peach. He’d traveled to Tashkent to try to track down the fruits written about by Orientalist Edward H. Schafer in The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, a history of exotica during the Tang dynasty. “The golden peaches actually existed,” wrote Schafer. “Twice in the seventh century, the kingdom of Samarkand sent formal gifts of fancy yellow peaches to the Chinese court.” But according to Schafer, these peaches had vanished without a trace. “What kind of fruit they may have been, and how they may have tasted, cannot now be guessed.”

  The grower told me he’s certain that the golden peaches were actually nectarines. “How could something be golden and fuzzy?” he asked. “A peach can’t shine. And the nectarines I found over there aren’t red at all; they just have an amazing golden luster.” Indeed, the small, shining fruits, now growing on his farm, were more golden than any nectarine or peach I’d ever seen. After finding the fruits in Tashkent, he’d pocketed a number of seeds and simply brought them home. “U.S. customs never asked about them. They didn’t care. They wanted to know if I had Russian nesting dolls.”

  Growing certain fruits is often the only way to taste them: even if they were to somehow be grown on a large enough scale to merit phytosanitary research and access to irradiation facilities, many are simply too fragile to survive the indignities of shipping. The Chinese emperor Hsüan Tsung used to employ a special horse-riding courier to provide lychees for his Precious Consort Lady Yang. This fruit cowboy would race across the entire length of China, from Lingnan to a palace near Ch’Ang-An, bearing his royal consignment. Other fruits were shipped inside leaden containers filled with snow, such as watermelons exported from Khwãrizm (an oasis in what is now southern Uzbekistan) and mare-nipple grapes transported across the desert from the Mountains of Heaven. But even by royal decree, much fruit cargo was so fragile that it couldn’t be transported to the capital. Queen Victoria purportedly promised knighthood to anyone who could bring her a fresh mangosteen from Southeast Asia. No one, so the yarn goes, could fulfill the task. But the queen had other cravings she managed to sate. She was so fond of Newtown pippin apples from Virginia that she waived their import duties.