Ahhh...the CITES paradox! It is a trade agreement, designed to protect endangered species (including orchids) from exploitation....yet it does nothing to protect endangered orchids. Here is where the intractable problem lies...an international agreement can do nothing to prevent collection within a country...it has no force on the internal laws of a country. Since no country or organization can force another one to regulate its internal traffic, the next best thing is to regulate international traffic...its all that really can be done. Sounds great...sounds appropriate...and it would be fine, it would be appropriate, if exceptions were easily made for clearly propagated material. So long as arguments persist over the interpretation and legitmacy of different country's CITES laws, preventing propagated plants from being freely traded, a black market will be encouraged. Just think...if seedlings and flasks of the new vietnamese paphs could have been made internationally available as soon as they were ready, demand for the illegal collected plants would have been lessened. Would that have eliminated the black market and illegal exports...no, it would not have...at first. But, once the flasks, then seedlings, became freely...and the word is freely, in the easily accessible sense....available, demand would have shifted to the propagated plants. Who wouldn't want a plant that was already grown under cultivation, probably selected for better form and vigor? Unfortunately this didn't happen....and now vietnamense has been reduced to a handful of seedlings in the wild...who knows what's left of hangianum and helenae? The issue is not with the concept of CITES itself...it can be made to work for orchids as well as elephants if it had some flexibility built into it....a flask is a flask...there is no denying that the contents of a flask were not collected from the wild....so why can't flasks be freely traded? If a plant got smuggled out of its home country...that is a crime...but why should its seedlings be criminal also? What would have happened if that first wave of smuggled Vietnamese paphs...whose offspring are freely available in some countries, was given the go-ahead to be traded in flask without restriction...and their offspring selfed, outcrossed, etc....to generate a whole population of propagated plants...? We will never know.....My apologies for deliberately avoiding the issue of Phrag kovachii...this was a plant whose publicity was so extensive that it was doomed from the start...no amount of regulation, CITES or otherwise, could have protected it under the circumstances...it would have needed an army to protect it...Take care, Eric Muehlbauer in sunny Queens NY...by tomorrow all orchids will be indoors as we face our first really cool weather of the season........... _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids
