Hawaiʻi is gussying up its ineffectual biosecurity declaration forms, replacing the decades-old paper questionnaires with an online platform.

Incoming air passengers may be familiar with the forms, which ask travelers to declare whether they’re carrying anything from reptiles to raw vegetables in an effort to block invasive species.

But the Department of Agriculture’s Plants and Animals Declaration forms have rarely led to enforcement, and a state audit in 2017 declared they “provide limited value, if any at all” to Hawai‘i’s biosecurity work. About 60% of Hawaiʻi’s millions of visitors don’t even complete them, even as the state, dubbed the invasive species capital of the world, struggles to preserve its fragile ecosystem.

Lawmakers and officials nevertheless celebrated the launch of Akamai Arrival, the digital version of the form, at a news conference on Monday at Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport. The pilot program, which aims to boost buy-in of the forms, will start Saturday and will be implemented on 82 inbound routes from the U.S. mainland to all the state’s airports.

But lawmakers and invasive species experts remain concerned that the forms are not enough to keep pests out of the state. The lax enforcement by the state Department of Agriculture doesn’t help, and the Honolulu airport lacks state-of-the-art detection apparatus, including dogs and scanners.

The agriculture department began developing the platform last year, after the Legislature called for the agency to modernize the practice, one that was overly reliant on passengers clamoring for pens or pencils ahead of their arrival into the state.

“Those days are going to end soon,” Green said at the press conference, calling the new platform a “biosecurity weapon” for Hawaiʻi.

Shifting toward an online platform is also intended to help streamline data collection, a cumbersome task with the paper-based process. In recent years the forms have been mostly used by the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority to harvest visitor data.

But the move follows a years-long process of trying to convince a “very reluctant” agriculture department to make the shift, Sen. Glenn Wakai said at the news conference on Monday.

“We all know that the best time to let a passenger know what not to bring into the state is before they get on the plane,” Wakai said. “Not when they’re sifting through their baggage to look for a pencil.”

Enforcing The ‘Honor System’

Offenses under current law can reach up to $25,000 or one year in prison for misrepresenting or lying about the contents of one’s bag. If a traveler knowingly brings a snake into Hawaiʻi, they could face up to $200,000 in fines.

But the state has not enforced those threats in about a decade, ever after the previous civil offenses were raised to a criminal level.

Wakai, who introduced the measure leading to the online shift, said there must be better enforcement.

“We need to take a page out of what the feds do,” he said in an interview. “Relying on the honor system, that’s just full of holes.”

Jonathan Ho, whose Department of Agriculture team oversees biosecurity statewide, said Monday that the agency is concerned about the intensity of the criminal penalties for passengers who fail to or falsely fill out the form. The Legislature is considering reverting to civil penalties, he said.

Lawmakers are also considering new legislation to give the state greater powers to inspect incoming passengers’ baggage, something many in the biosecurity sector see as incredibly important to stopping pests from making it past the border.

Going To The Dogs

Dogs are among the most effective at detecting invasive species, and are used by nations with state-of-the-art biosecurity sectors, such as Australia and New Zealand.

The agriculture department has considered implementing a sniffer dog program, although staffers have said there is limited capacity in Hawaiʻi for the dogs and they are expensive.

But Wakai said the money that will be saved by digitizing the paper forms — about $800,000 — will be able to cover three beagles and help supplement the state’s digitization program.

Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz has also criticized the state agency for lax enforcement and said in a January briefing there was little point in moving ahead with digitization until the current forms were enforced.

State lawmakers, including Dela Cruz, traveled to New Zealand in the past year to glean information about better biosecurity.

Nations like New Zealand and Australia have comprehensive border checks of passenger luggage and commercial cargo at air and sea ports, with large infrastructure networks and hefty fines. They include on-site fines of hundreds of dollars, along with seizure and destruction of goods.

In Hawaiʻi, lawmakers are considering the same.

“If the department doesn’t start to make an example of people who don’t do it, then nobody’s going to take it seriously,” Dela Cruz said in January. “We’ve got coconut rhinoceros beetle, little fire ants, and the list goes on and on and on. And it’s just getting worse.”

Sen. Karl Rhoads, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agrees Hawaiʻi needs to get serious about policing the forms, whether on paper or digital, and increasing oversight of incoming travelers. “If there’s no back-end enforcement, you just walk out of there and there’s nothing stopping you from doing it,” he said. “It’s not the penalty that matters, it’s whether you think you’ll get caught.”

“Hawai‘i Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.