If possible It would be nice to keep this post up
for one week to allow people to see it and comment.
CITES proposal for nursery certification, By Jerry Lee Fischer 07,01,07
To all interested in the subject of Orchid
species and hybrids as imports or exports,
Recent changes in CITES requirements have made it
difficult for nurseries, and hobbyists alike to
not only import plants from foreign countries
directly but even acquire them from nurseries in
the country in which hobbyists and professional growers live.
In the US for example the requirements are that a
nursery must now have a master permit. Every
plant to be exported whether it is a species or
hybrid must be approved by the US Fish and
Wildlife authorities with information on the
propagation methods (whether from seed, cuttings
or cloning techniques) if not then whom the
plants were purchased from with receipts, pot
sizes of plants in stock, annual production,
number of plants to be exported each year,
whether parental stock is maintained and how
many, from seed or cuttings etc. and number of years in production.
Imagine filling out such a permit (in my case it
took 250 hours) and then imagine it taking 9
months to a year to get it. The idea is that once
you get this permit single issue copies are
purchased in advance and the nursery owner can
fill them out when orders are received and ship
them out rather quickly compared to the old
system of waiting 3-6 months for a single use
permit. In the mean time orders cannot be
processed and commercial growers are put in
situation of economic hardship. Adding any new
plants to your permit requires all the same
detailed information, costs a lot and there is no
guarantee that the permits will arrive in a
timely manner. Several US growers have given up
on exports and many more will follow suit.
Hybrids have become another problem, as one has
to either be approved for specific hybrids on the
master permit or have to be approved for specific
species that make up the hybrid. At the moment
you have to list on your permit the species that
make up the hybrids that you want to export. This
takes a great deal of time and is really
counterproductive. It often requires 20 to 35
hours to complete a permit. The US Fish and
Wildlife service has come up with a way of
amending your permit to accept hybrids but it
still requires reporting and is limited to certain hybrids.
The various countries management authorities and
CITES officials are, I believe unaware of the
great advances in the laboratory production of
orchids that have taken place within the past few
years. Nurseries are now able to reproduce in
reasonable numbers those plants that were once
considered difficult or even impossible to
produce. The continued over-regulation of
artificially propagated plants and the nurseries
that produce them is in my opinion a complete
waste of CITES resources. The entire reason CITES
was created in the first place was to protect
wild populations of living organisms that were
threatened by trade. This is what it says in the
first paragraph on
http://www.cites.org/www.cites.org home page,
CITES (the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is an
international agreement between governments. Its
aim is to ensure that international trade in
specimens of wild animals and plants does not
threaten their survival. If anything the rapid
artificial production and propagation of orchid
plants helps to ensure that wild stock will
remain where it is. Many of our nurseries are
really no longer trading in wild stock at all. Why over-regulate it?
Recent examples of how things have changed can be
found in PERU where no wild collecting for export
is allowed. All plants must now be produced at
the approved nurseries from seed or division of
established stock. Phragmipedium kovachii would
never have been allowed for export legally except
for the work of serious nursery owners and the
Peruvian government. By allowing a few plants to
be collected and used for seed propagation via
tissue culture these plants are now all over the
world and the demand for wild plants no longer
exists. Other countries like Ecuador and Brazil are following suit.
If continued restriction and over-regulation
continues in its present state there will be less
and less plants available and eventually the
hobby itself will be threatened. Orchid Societies
memberships would begin to decline, as there
would be no new plant material for hobbyists to
be interested in. Nurseries interested in growing
and exporting species or hybrids have already
declined in The US and other parts of the globe.
The process or acquiring export permits has
become so onerous that some nurseries have chosen
to give up their export business. Many without
the ability to export will not survive.
There is an important synergy between Orchid
Societies, hobbyists and
