Flora expo plant escapees threaten Kingdom
The alien plants stolen from the Royal Flora exhibition in Chiang Mai could pose a grave threat to the ecosystem of the country, a horticulture expert warned yesterday.
"No one knows whether the stolen plants carry pests or disease," Suravitch Wannakrairoj of Kasetsart University said in a telephone interview. He demanded stricter quarantine measures, saying that once pests and plant diseases were established in the wild they would be hard to control. To facilitate organisation of the event, the Agriculture Department in May declared the whole 470-rai expo site the Ratchaphruek Plant Quarantine Station, which means that all the millions of trees and plants displayed there are still in quarantine. Suravitch found it strange that a place where tens of thousands of people were allowed to roam around daily was a plant quarantine facility, where officials are supposed to hold and observe imported plants until they are certain they carry no pests or disease. "Even if plants aren't stolen, some pests could get out of the site by taking a free ride on the visitors," he said. A quarantine station should be an isolated area to which only officials assigned there have access, and the movement of plants , in and out should be restricted, he said. Unhealthy plants have been replaced with new ones almost every week. Jitniphat Singhavilaithorn, chief of the Ratchaphruek Plant Quarantine Office, denied that the country was exposed to any new danger. "As Thailand is in a tropical zone where the temperature and the environment are conducive to pests and plant diseases arising and spreading, almost all the pests and plant diseases prevalent in the world are here already. I would have thought other countries would be more afraid of us than we of them," he said. Only plants from Central and South America might carry pests and diseases that would imperil the ecosystem here, and no plants from there are on show at the expo, he said. It was almost impossible for foreign pests to be brought in with imported plants since all plants suspected of carrying them required health certification, and no plants listed as forbidden species in Thailand were imported for the expo, he said. Plants from two countries suspected of harbouring pests were sprayed. Bromeliads and orchids have been reported missing. Since its grand opening on November 1 the expo has attracted 30,000 people a day on average. It runs until the end of January.
Pennapa Hongthong The Nation
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