Cut corners led to expensive Magic Road palm tree fiasco

The bugs attacking expensive palm trees on the avenue leading to Hong Kong Disneyland could have been caught if the trees had been subjected to the required stringent quarantine.

But the procedure was bypassed by a government contractor, a source close to the HK$200 million Penny's Bay greening project said.

The palms, imported from Australia, were instead stored on the mainland for a year, exempting them from the requirement, before being imported in 2004, the source said.

"There was not enough space to store the numerous exotic trees imported from many places around the world. The contractor was required to put them in temporary nurseries."

Infested with two destructive pests, 72 palms along Magic Road are dying and have to be replaced. Sixteen of 100 trees originally imported were reportedly found to be infested when they arrived and were burned.

University of Hong Kong ecology expert Professor Jim Chi-yung said moving exotic plants to the mainland was a common way to bypass the quarantine. But he argued the quarantine process itself might have killed off the palms in this case.

The uniformly sized palms on Magic Road are estimated to be 20 to 30 years old, and each one cost HK$100,000 - 10 times the price of other palms.

Jim said that if imported directly from Australia they would have undergone strict quarantine as required by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department.

This would have involved removal of all the soil around their roots to check for pests.

"Palm trees as old as 30 years could die without soil," Jim said.

"It made the quarantine simply impossible. The government should know this."

Plants imported from the mainland are exempt from such checks, he said. "It's simply impossible to conduct detailed checks on everything from the other side of the border given the daily import of pigs and vegetables, which are also mingled with mud and soil."

The source said the selection of the palm trees was a request by the theme park, to be consistent with the landscaping at its headquarters in southern California.

A spokeswoman for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department said the department only took up the maintenance work in 2006 and had identified the presence of coconut leaf beetles. Other experts have speculated that the palms were also attacked by red palm weevils.

The department said the current contractor, City Landscaping Company, would be required to replace the dead trees at its own cost.

The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said it had inspected the trees at the mainland nurseries and the planting site from 2002 to 2005 but found no pests.

The massive greening project was part of the HK$2.08 billion tender awarded to China State Construction Engineering by the Civil Engineering Department in 2001. The department did not say why the palm trees were not directly imported from Australia. The contractor could not be reached for comment yesterday.