Thanks Peter for your comments and suggestions. I will try and clarify what I mean a little better. I was at the 1994 plants committee meeting is San Miguel de'Allende in Mexico when the whole nursery registration proposal came up. As the president of the Commercial Orchid Growers Guild at the time we were very much against nursery registration because CITES wanted to require nurseries to report annually on how many plants were sold, how many had died, how many were produced etc. We were very much against registration at the time because we simply don't have time to deal with the record keeping that was being proposed. The registration process is not quite like that now but does require a lot of work. In my case it took over 250 hours to complete my permit.
Nursery registration does not change the amount of paperwork required with each shipment nor does it prevent countries or trading states like the E.U. from requiring onerous import permits. What I am talking about really is once a nursery is certified let those truly art prop plants trade without a CITES permit altogether. All that would be needed is a CERTIFICATION stamp or number to travel with the plants. The permits themselves are a nightmare and require dozens of hours to prepare. While I appreciate the concept behind the CITES nursery registration program it doesn't go far enough. We in the U.S have a master permit requirement now which my own nursery Orchids Limited has complied with. This master permit is in fact a nursery registration. It precisely follows the guidelines of the registration requirements as explained in conf. 9.19 http://www.cites.org/eng/res/all/09/E09-19R13.pdf . The point is that the process of exporting is worse not better because of this. We must for instance list species involved in each hybrid and if we are not already approved for exporting a particular hybrid on our master list then we must be approved for the species that go into making that hybrid. This takes lots of time as you can imagine! I have to chuckle when I am exporting a division of say a Paph. F.C. Puddle, a hybrid made near the beginning of the 20th century. Many orders may contain only one of each type of hybrid so this kind of reporting for each shipment really does not make it a viable business situation. What I am asking for is that instead of leaving it up to the various countries to register their nurseries make it rather a certification process with CITES as the registrar. You can call it registration if you want to but require that all nurseries in any signatory country to be certified for art prop export. The various countries could in fact certify the nurseries under an overall umbrella or process overseen by CITES but CITES would be the registrar in the end. Once the nursery is certified let those truly art prop plants go into trade without further (complicated) permits. What I am really saying is remove all art prop Orchids from the appendices and let them be traded. The treaty is designed to protect wild populations. Let's do so now. Jerry Lee Fischer Orchids Limited 4630 Fernbrook Lane N. Plymouth, Minnesota 55446 USA Toll-free: 1-800-669-6006 Local: 763-559-6425 Fax: 763-557-6956 Website: www.orchidweb.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
