Viateur wrote: > You wrote : "CITES ... making it harder to trade plants ... it hinders the > trade both of illegal AND legal plants through a horrible bureaucracy..." > Are you in favor of the trade of illegal plants ?
Of course not. But artificially propagated plants should not be put in the catagory of " illegal" should they? > What measures do you suggest to put an end to bureaucracy in relation to > CITES ?> You also wrote : > 1) "can�t we have a program to "promote" the multiplication AND trade of > desirable plants > 2) that is an ANTI-CITES trade agreement > 3) The native plants would sure be left alone!" > These are unsubstantiated opinions. Sorry Viateur, these are not, repeat , not unsubstantiated opinions. I live in northeast Brazil, poor third world part of a poor third world country. While this may be a theoretical , phylosophical discussion for some people , I see these things occuring literally in my back yard . First of all: in relation to the billions ( that�s right, bi, not millions) of plants ( plus fauna, of course) being lost by burning, stripping of the forests, etc. this incident over Pk has to be put in perspective - it`s the proverbial drop in the ocean. So , you say, CITES has nothing to do with this problem - it�s only objective is curbing illegal trade. I have worked in a cactus and succulents nursery in southern california as a plant propagator. We propagated some 6 million plus plants per year. Some of these were endangered in the wild, so , by provinding thousands of these plants to the market it made it highly unprofitable for people to run all the risks and bring plants from the wild - considering that , I might be wrong here, almost every country in the world has some type of legislation about illegal collection. > At local orchid shows, we have nurseries from Brasil, Ecuador, Peru and > Taiwan selling orchids. True. However , from the red-tape my boss went through every time he had to export, I can only imagine what these people have to put up with... > Instead of anti-CITES, it might be more productive to favor pro-orchid, > pro-multiplication and pro-CITES activities. That�s exactly what I meant . Why can�t the bureaucrats take the simple measure of sending someone with a knowledge of plant propagation to visit the nurseries and check if they have the proper propagation facilities to justify the export, or if they acquired from some lab, to check the sources and the seedlings. I think it would be easy for a professional to see the difference between lab grown and wild collected plants - than again , maybe I'm being too optimistic and nurseries are able to fool anybody... Regards, Julio _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
