Customs warning: ANY meat might cost you 10,000 NTD fine or more

No. Do you check every single time you travel because custom regs may have changed in the last 2 months? No fresh fruits and vegs = obvious and well understood. No ham sandwiches is completely new, I think.

I’m going to say his answer would probably be yes.

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Very unfortunate for a sandwich. Really sucks.

I’m not beating up on you like I said I feel for you but I also check custom rules when I travel because they are changing so much in this world today. And in the end it’s our personal responsibility when we fly into a country to know the rules and regulations.

Fine might be new, but I think the no meat even cooked rule is not new.

Personally I think for a sandwich they should have asked you for the receipt from the airport and then just gave you a warning.

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Sucks man, were you looking forward to the sandwich?

No, actually the international standard is that the airline is supposed to be supplied with customs forms and pass them out. The traveler is absolutely responsible for reading the customs form and complying, but the requirement to inform the passenger in writing of the regs seems to me to be an international standard.

Scoot definitely f-ed up by not even giving out any custom forms. I don’t know if Taiwan screwed up in not keeping Scoot supplied and/or not caring whether Scoot complied with the legally required program.

I did take one of Taiwan’s customs forms after they sliced into my nether regions. Here’s ALL it says about this whole subject (it’s quite clear on liquor, cigs, firearms etc):

Passengers shall declare
6. Any aquatic products or any species of animal/plant or product thereof. [sure sounds like they expect me to declare any cotton t-shirts, socks, etc] (Fruit and other articles failing quaranteen shall be sent back). the last sentence is in red. sure seems to say that the penalty shall be confiscation.

Apparently they also had a nice color printout about the meat prohibition. I sure as f# didn’t get one of those, neither at the airport in Taiwan nor on the plane. It’s sure is not the passengers responsibility to be a mind reader. Well maybe it is in China but I expect better of Taiwan. Anyway say whatever you want, I’m very sure that the guys who wrote the law on this enforcement said that every passenger was supposed to get that notice. That would have made their action fair. But the implementation sucked royally.

This my last word on this subject, here. I may scream at Scoot, they deserve the shit out of it. If I can figure out who to write to at Tainwan customs I’ll do that too, just for the heck of it.

only passengers who need to declare something should fill the form at Taiwan’s custom. So many airlines don’t hand out the form unless requested by passengers. They surely expect travelers know what they can/cannot bring in and what they should declare beforehand.

They could have warned you before boarding the plane, because it’s been in the news here a lot recently. But I can understand if you come from another place and nobody warns you, how are you supposed to know it? It’s not like Australia where everyone knows they are super strict about a lot of stuff.

thats pretty brutal. i got kfc last time i flew into taiwan, from the previous aiport. i didn’t leave it on the plane, which i should have. but i made sure to throw it out in the toilet bin. its an easy mistake to make if you need something to eat, i always try to buy something to eat before or on the plane because i hate the plane food.

Yes, customs authorities worldwide expect and require passengers to know precisely what their regulations are because they produce and distribute the customs forms that tell you what their specific regs are. The passenger MUST read and comply, that is the legal obligation of the passengers, again not to mind read without being supplied with the statement of what rules they enforce. They may or may not need to make a declaration; it is indeed the form that defines that for the passengers. What kind of universe do you live in where you think passengers will somehow know the customs reg for each country which may be different? People can now search the web but every country I’ve visited for decades has prepared the customs forms for passengers to be informed and make declaration if required. It’s not supposed to be a guessing game, again there are international standards and for a very good reason, because otherwise it would be complete nonsense.

Taiwan, too, though not this time and it’s quite ironic because in addition to the normal customs form, Taiwan customs has prepared the page describing the meat prohibition and warning of fines. The whole idea behind preparing the ‘handout’ is to hand it out. Again only a really sucked out country would expect visitors to know the regulations without distributing the legally required forms.

By you just like to argue, not necessarily make sense, imo.

Andrew, just FYI, it’s interesting wrt your remarks on this being an issue in Japan. I was there for the last 6 weeks and saw 2 articles in the Japan times, neither discussed much besides the cost of pork in MLC and Vietnam. The funny thing is that it looks to me like you may well have gotten your Japan news wrt quarantine in the Hong Kong paper, South China Morning Post! They wrote back in Feb noting a tiny number of afflicted pigs 1600 animals in Jan and 11,000 later. They also addressed Japanese fears that Chinese visitors might bring infected pork during the lunar new year visits, (and that fines were on the books but not being issued in practice). But again, tiny tiny numbers compared to Vietnam and MLC. My point is that it’s not been a big issue in Japan - not visible at all locally - the issue with tourists bringing infection into Japan was actually only reported in Hong Kong (tho note that my search was limited to English language sources). Zero visible concern at Japan customs at KIX in May when I arrived from Taiwan. I believe you had it mostly quite wrong and it got almost zero attention in Japan. Taiwan is understandably quite concerned about possible impact to their economy but if Taiwan customs think that people in e.g. Japan or Singapore (Scoot airline == zero info given out) have any clue that they have such a strict embargo going, they are dead clueless. Neither of those countries have a similarly large potential economic impact as they have low level $ value of pig farming.

It’s hard to let go of this. I’m always a frugal traveler and this is the first time I’ve been stung like this in 4 decades of travels, and of course it’s total BS for Taiwan customs to assume that everybody coming here has been informed. And in a few years of coming here back and forth from Japan many times without a visa I never encountered anything in Taiwan dickheaded like this. Zero run-ins with any authorities or anybody else in Taiwan for that matter.

SCMP (Feb) : https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2185063/japan-cracks-down-african-swine-fever-and-chinese-tourists

Japan times (May): https://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/african-swine-fever/

I don’t think it’s BS. They probably could have done more to warn people. But it’s your responsibility as a traveler to know ultimately as much as it sucks. I always check when I travel, but I too might have missed connecting a sandwich to meat products. Taiwan always had some laws against certain meats like Italian prosciutto.

It’s pretty shitty as you’re clearly not trying to smuggle things in. But it’s sadly needed since China decided to not honor one of the few agreements made and not give us information about outbreaks

When you got off the plane, at the end of the jet bridge, there were no officials handing out little cards explaining the situation? Then, before baggage claim, a pre-screen area? I fly a lot, but through Taipei. Everyone gets one of those cards after landing. The card says if you have meat to go through the pre-screening line before immagration. If not, you simply hand the card back and proceed to immigration, baggage, customs. Are they not doing that there? Or were they doing that, you went through the pre-screening, and you were fined anyway?

I flew in from bkk a few weeks ago and they didn’t hand out those cards you can bypass security either. This was late at night

When I fly in from Manila within the last month I got cards to bypass, and when I fly in from hk they inform me very clearly about the rules

Didn’t op fly in from japan, I think you should have got one of those cards to bypass screening as the screening only applies to China. Has this changed ?

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I guess it would be to much to ask for a consistently applied process.

I’ve gotten the card on every single flight I’ve taken, from the US, China, Singapore, Korea…I think since January.

The card to bypass security ? I never get it( and shouldn’t get it) when flying in from China, but for other countries I do(except when I came from Bangkok)

No, definitely nobody in the jetway or the corridor to passport control. I had no check-in bags so after getting thru immigration I went right to customs . There was a lady with a very big poster with pictures of ag products. There would have been some stuff about meats mixed with that but I’ve seen warnings about no fruits so I thought that’s all it was about.

From what you said it sounds like they screwed up their process. There were a ton of people from Phillippines there like I’ve never seen before at KHH, and I came in after them so it may be that somebody was taking a break. Could also be that they were in the baggage claim area that I skirted around. Definitely I saw nobody handing out those cards - I’m sure they were like the ones they attached to the fine document after the fact.

Thanks for explaining how you’ve seen the processing working.