A woman has been sentenced to 100 hours community work and a year's supervision after she got busted at Auckland International Airport in 2019 trying to sneak in hundreds of cacti and succulents that were strapped to her body.
Wendy Li pleaded guilty to charges stemming from two smuggling attempts, involving illegal plants and seeds from China, that she stood to make thousands of dollars from by selling them online.
"The really concerning part to me is that this is akin to body-packing, which is something you would normally see with a drug smuggler," Ministry of Primary Industries director of compliance Gary Orr told Checkpoint.
"She had these plants, 947 succulents and eight cacti, packed into stockings which were wrapped around her body. So it was deliberate, it was intentional, and she knew that what she was doing was a prohibited activity.
"She was trading these things through social media as well, so this wasn't just around her having a personal interest in plants - being an avid collector - she was doing this for commercial gain."
Orr said the haul was estimated to be worth more than $10,000 in sales.
"The other really concerning part of it is that eight of them were subject to the cities legislation - the trade in endangered species. That's really concerning because these are our endangered and threatened species, and any of them being taken out of the wild reduces the sustainability of their population."
He said MPI's detector dog Greer did a "fantastic" job at picking up on the scent of the plants hidden on the woman.
"She then tried to avoid the attention of our staff and headed off to the toilet. And she promptly got rid of the material. Interestingly, she chose to dump some of it in the men's toilet thinking we probably wouldn't check there because she was a woman. But our staff are trained very well, they know all of those sort of ruses and they checked thoroughly, located the material and she got held to account."
The annoying element of the case he says is that it is not the first smuggling attempt the woman has made, Orr said.
"This is not her first rodeo… we've caught her previously smuggling in seeds and that was again, quite a well-concealed importation. The seeds were in commercially packaged iPad covers, so you wouldn't normally think to look in those, and it was only through our robust detection methods at the border that they were identified."
He said he would be foolish not to say there are others trying to smuggle plants. "But I'm extremely confident the measures we have in place at our border will identify people trying to covertly bring the sort of materials through either on their person in their luggage or through our mail centre.
"We regularly get detections, it's not huge, but every attempt to bring plant material or animal material into New Zealand endangers our biosecurity, and that's why we work so hard to keep our borders safe."
Work is a lot quieter for border control with the borders essentially closed and fewer planes landing, he said.
"But we're still probably seeing greater traffic through the mail centres because people are ordering stuff through social media and over the internet, and that all comes in through the mail centre. So that's increased pressure there.
"It ranges from animal products through to dairy products which are really risky for New Zealand. Anything that can bring in a disease that is not present and that might actually undermine our primary sector, because if it gets past the border it is so incredibly difficult to contain."
