It may be that I have missed something. I understand orchid movements to be limited under CITES to the movement of mature plants. Flasked seedlings are exempt, as are botanical specimens suitable for taxonomy, cut flowers and - if not explicitly, then how is this different from a cut flower? - seed capsules. If so, absolutist debate about who has what seems a bit pointless, as these days the technology for artifical propagation is pretty well universal. One does not even need seeds: as most know, a root cap will do for a mericlone. I am sure that there are bits of a flower that could be obliged to recover their meristem potential with a hormonal nudge or two, and there you have absolutely legal shipments of whatever you want.
As an example of applied ingenuity, Dick Warren (Equatorial Plants) evolved an interesting technique which he already publicised, so by writing this I am not doing him a disfavour. (A more environmentally-conscious person it would be hard to meet.) Dick travelled with a three essential items of equipment: capsules of sterilised water, standard low volume hypodermics and individual ampoules of the sort that have rubber seals. These last were filled with the standard seed support jelly used for orchid propagation. The trick was to find a ripe capsule that had not yet opened and which was thus essentially sterile internally, with luck. Sterile water was drawn into a hypodermic, and the needle then driven into the capsule. The water was used to flush seed out of the capsule and withdrawn into the hypodermic. One jab more and the sterile ampoule has its sterile seeds sown in it. Write a label, into the backpask and there you are. The blanket ban on orchids seems to be a degree inane to me. I am absolutely agreed that specific showy species need protection, as do other species which attract too much human attention. The argument was that customs officers could not know an threatened species from anything else, but that they would recognise an orchid when they saw it. (A dubious proposition, perhaps.) Today, of course, Cytochrome C Oxidase (CCO) barcoding is cheap and straightforward, with the technology in place. Indeed, it would be equally easy to raise monoclonal antibodies to the key endangered species, and thus have a simple dipstick test to apply at entry that would detect the presence of a key protein from any of these, using a tiny tissue sample. Times have moved on. I would like to see the CITES law in respect of wild collected plants to be changed in three ways. First, to distinguish between the trade in small numbers of plants and mass collections, and to free up the former so as to allow freer trade amongst specialists. Restricted species are treated in (2) below. However, most orchid species are not threatened by export volumes, and are of interest to a tiny group of people. A straightforward system of quotas could restrict absolute numbers per exporter. Second, to place the onus on the exporter and importer to guarantee, at risk of severe penalty, that they plants in question were not on the endangered list. Spot CCO checks would act as a good deterrent to cheats. Three, a transparent system that defines with some specificity what is endangered and what is not. Such assesments should take into account why the species in endangered. If the Malaysian government allows the entire forest of Sarawak to be felled, then export limits are not going to help its orchids. If domestic tourists are the chief purchasers of of wild-collected orchids in North Thailand, then measures to manage this would be a good use of money. One last technological point. I was once a director of a company that evolved a monoclonal antibody (MCA) verification scheme. We raised MCAs against a barcode of persistent, harmless but defined molecules that are not found in nature. Anything - a cosmetic, a cheese, even the CDs of a widely used operating system - could be tagged with a fingerprint mixture of these, in nanomolar - even femtomolar - quantities. The antibodies to these report the presence or absence with a simple dipstick test. Fakes and forgeries do not contain the right fingerprint, and can be detected in a matter of minutes and at a cost of less than a US cent. Now consider a CITES-accredited grower. The inspection authorities visit a nursery and designate a block of plants as purpose grown. They watch as the grower sprays a mixture of highly dilute compounds which they provide onto these plants. The residue of this spray can easily be detected a year or more later, using the system described above. Ergo, any plant from that grower, with that barcode label shown as valid by the test, can be certified by import authorities as purpose grown. ______________________________ Oliver Sparrow +44 (0)1628 823187 www.chforum.org _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
