Charles, your response (below) to my posting doesn't make sense:
>The EU just wants to protect their sales of mericlones and cutflowers. >Unless I have a poor following of alot of Thailand's exports, a huge amount >of plant material (orchids) is in the form of cut flower stems, which I >believe were allowed quick shipping anyways because there is no media >involved, just need phyto exams to make sure leaves don't have bugs or >disease. You don't have a poor following of local orchid economics, the vast majority is indeed sales of cutflowers. These have, indeed required only a Phyto, not CITES. For more than a decade EU countries have been the world's second largest importer of ASEAN orchid cutflowers (Japan is the biggest), so I don't understand what you mean by "the EU just wants to protect their sales of cutflowers". It doesn't make sense. Also, the Thai proposals appear to have been related to plants in pots, not cut flowers. Linking the two doesn't make sense, either. It seems to me that their objections had some effect, because in the final approved version the liberalisation was not wholesale but was confined to a few hybrid genera (in some cases, sections, not the whole genus) where the most mass-produced hybrids are relatively easy to distinguish from the species. Other limitations have been put in place to act as a deterrent to those seeking to exploit a loophole in CITES ... eg, the requirement that only plants IN FLOWER can be exported this way. I made this point on OGD last November, didn't I ? I'm still waiting to hear of that foolproof method for distinguishing art-prop hybrids from recently-cultivated plants that were originally wild-collected, when not in flower. I'm sure this point was central to the debate in Bangkok. Cheers, Peter O'Byrne Singapore _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids
