Dear Wayne,
My two cents on this: The idea is bad as is any similar incentive to
have a government agency micromanage human activity.
The reason why the problem with illegal wildlife trafficing became as
serious as it has ever been is that this 'business' is PROFITABLE. It is
profitable for the local poachers who are often compelled to harvest and
resell wildlife as a way to feed their families. It is profitable for
smugglers who constantly polish their tactics in evading border control.
It is profitable for illegal dealers who know how to find loopholes or
have the approptiate 'contacts' among the authorities. Finally, the
persistentce of this problem and and its growing trend work as positive
reinforcement for regulatory agencies - either as an argument to demand
more funding from the government (in the best case scenario) or as a way
to stimulate corruption (in the worst). By imposing restrictions on
wildlife trade far beyond their own enforcement capacity, government
agencies effectively set the stage for such positive feedback systems.
Imposing more severe restrictions and/or punishment only rases the
stakes in this 'cat-and-mouse' game with no positive effect. Every time
a new regulatory incentive is put forward, those who profit from illegal
trade will remain one notch ahead of the enforcement mechanisms. At the
same time, people and organizations conducting legal wildlife
transactions, harvesting, or research (e.g., zoos, museums, and captive
breeding programs) get hit with yet another set of compliance
requirements that they need to meet in order to continue their work. All
that eventually happens is yet more public funding (including research
grants) gets converted into yet more bureaucracy. As a by-product, it
can sometines discourage or even force to shut down research projects in
biology if the associated bureaucratic burden becomes unbearable.
Personally, I do not see how the problem with illegal wildlife trade is
conceptually different from illegal drug trafficking. Perhaps the key
difference I can think of is that the latter was recently recognized by
the UN as unsolvable using the current regulatory and policing
strategies employed throughout the past decades. The global community
has yet to accept a similar failure in its attempt to curb illegal
wildlife trade through government and international regulation. This is
particularly sad, given that the bulk of the biodiversity lost today is
due to habitat loss anyway. When species rich ecosystems are converted
into biofuels and replaced with farmland or shopping malls, it is done
for very similar profit reasons as wildlife trade. However, such
activities are regulated at a different scale; they do not fall under
the competence of the CBD or CITES, nor do captive or harvesting
permits, microchips or anything of that sort apply to them.
As a law-obiding taxpayer, I am not thrilled with the idea of an
Orwellian future where wildlife enforcement squads will be raiding
citizens' households and checking for microchips in every hamster while
the destruction of millions of hectares of natural habitat goes on
unchecked. I would much rather see my tax money diverted towards more
international and govermnent efforts that will focus on empowering local
communities to develop sustainable conservation initiatives and will
make it profitable (and legally possible!) for 'people of the land' to
maintain and protect their biodiversity and natural resources instead of
depleting them. At the regulatory level, I would prefer to see a
licencing, rather than a permitting, system be instituted for registered
breeders, researchers, and other people/institutions professionally
working with wildlife and not involved in large scale commercial
harvesting and habitat alteration. A similar system seems to work well
for hunters and drivers and I doubt that it will fail in regulating a
much smaller number of professionals. It will likely enable to lower the
proportion of regulators to the people they control, potentially
releasing tax money for something more constructive.
Lastly, I can understand the implicit interest of government reguatory
agencies in complicating the permitting procedures, thus urging their
governmets to increase funding, staffing and infrastructure needed to
accommodate an ever growing amount of regulatory needs. What I don't
understand is why the scientific community at large remains passively
supportive of such initiatives, despite the fact that researchers and
the legitimate organizations they represent are the first - and
sometines the only ones - to be impacted by such 'innovations' in a
negative way. Apologies for the long rant...
PS Just to clarify: I am not a conspirologist and not an anarchist, but
I do think that the trajectory where many societies are headed with
government regulatory micromanagement goes way beyond common sense...
Alex
On 04/07/2011 2:45 AM,
