Oh dear! Oh dear!
How hope springs eternal....
So much hype developing around the forthcoming CITES conference.
The same hype I saw and warned against when the SA Portfolio Committee of Parliament held the Colloquium on lion farming last year.
And as I predicted, that initiative is now mired in bureaucracy in the form of a 'high level panel' (!!)
Better read this before you get too excited. Sorry to rain on other peoples' parade yet again...
CITES and Sustainable Use
Imagine that you are sitting in a plenary session of CITES in Kuala Lumpur or some other exotic conference venue for international talk shops. You are one of 5000 people in a vast hall, each with your own special interest and agenda. Next to you is sitting a Japanese piano maker. He has no interest whatever in the conservation of lions. He is merely there to ensure that he can continue to get his hardwood supplies from Indonesia. It is quite impossible for you to speak or be heard. There are just too many people and to many different and often conflicting agendas.
Now you can see why CITES was doomed to fail from the start. CITES is not a conservation body. It is a trade organisation. How on earth did we come to a situation where a trade organisation dictates policy to conservationists around the world? How bizarre!
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-01-17-cites-the-trade-system-that-doesnt-know-that-it-doesnt-know/
So flick through the links below just to see for yourselves what a useless, toothless piece of international bureaucracy CITES is, and why you should not waste your time trying to get this species or that moved from this Appendix to that.
In the real world of wildlife trafficking, CITES is a joke.
Other than CITES, which we can discount, the hunting industry is further protected by the international conservation policy known as sustainable use. This has been adopted by most countries as part of the Convention on Biodiversity.
For the hunting industry the doctrine of ‘wise use’(!) Is an international licence to kill. For the wildlife it is a disaster and you should be campaigning for a brand new conservation paradigm.
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-and-other-dangerous-illusions
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-cry-for-preservation-of-wilderness
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/a-deplorables-view-of-mal-investment-in-conservation
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/pouring-cold-water-on-sustainable-use
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-the-apologists-fight-back
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/several-good-reasons-to-abolish-cites
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/lions-and-treaties
http://www.cannedlion.org/blog/cites-a-model-of-bureaucratic-waste
