2005-10-10 / Taiwan News, Staff Reporter / By Chang Ling-yin

Taiwan's agency responsible for agricultural inspection and quarantine asserted yesterday that it would ban imported apples from the United States if any more batches of the fruit inspected by the end of October are found to contain pests.

The Council of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine announced its tough line after codling moth larvae was discovered in apples taken from an imported lot of 1,029 cartons last Tuesday.

The COA on Friday banned the import of apples from the Washington State orchard that supplied them, and decided to double the number of samples inspected from each batch of imported apples from 2 to 4 percent to prevent the pest from invading Taiwan's fruit farms.

The 1,029-carton lot will be destroyed or returned to the United States, the COA said in a statement.

After the discovery, which was the first time pests had been found in U.S. apples this year but the third since November 2002, the U.S. government promised to intensify its inspections of the fruit before it left American shores. With that commitment, Taiwan's quarantine bureau gave U.S. exporters another chance.

But the bureau stressed that if it found any other infested batches, all American apple imports would be banned until the U.S government satisfies Taiwan's requirement that it had improved its inspection procedures.

At present, 60 percent of the apples sold in Taiwan come from the United States, with the majority of those coming from the state of Washington. The market share has fallen from the 70 percent share the U.S. held when the quarantine bureau first found the codling moth larvae in American apples in November 2002.

At that time, U.S. apple imports were immediately suspended for one month, and local apple prices shot up. The bureau also banned American apples for four months last year after a similar discovery.

The codling moth is particularly destructive and hard to detect because of its pale color and small size. The pests consume the fruit and cause it to bruise, decay and fall off its branch before ripening. And as soon as the pests invade a fruit farm, over 90 percent of the produce is often damaged.