CITES Is Proving That It Has No Legal Standing (1)

As we speak the 19th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the CITES Treaty is underway in Panama City, Panama.

With such a laudable title - and being in operation since 1975 one can assume that particularly bona fide hunters - but also possibly less informed casual readers may be interested to learn of the successes that this organisation has achieved. There forever are international news flashes about endangered wildlife in the weeks before these conferences and people should learn about the hopeful turn-around of the endangered status of some fauna and flora species worldwide.

CITES lists its own evaluation of so-called “endangered” species in Apendices I and II to the Treaty. A reading of these Appendices (which will be presented in a follow-up post) can be used as a baseline by which to measure whether inclusion of a species in the list has in fact protected that particular species.

Added to its protection mission CITES should also be evaluated whether such listing had ended illegal trade and poaching of that species. Furthermore, the question needs to be asked whether listing and other control actions have improved the social welfare of the people in the participating nation states who have to live their daily lives in close interaction with wild (and often dangerous) wildlife species.

The answer to whether CITES is or has been successful in its esoteric mission is a resounding “NO”.

Since its founding this organisation has been a sad, shameful and consistent failure. Reading this report the reader may, like the author, at the end come to the conclusion that CITES in fact is nothing but a fake organisation with no real interest in neither the wildlife it purports to protect nor the people who have custody of and control over such wildlife. It will be seen that CITES has become a neo-colonialist organisation that has but one aim: to grab control of countries’ wildlife resources and wildlife management actions – and particularly so in Southern Africa.

Untrained and totally uninvolved bureaucrats in the USA, Switzerland and other Northern Hemisphere countries are prescribing how we in Southern Africa should manage our wildlife and other natural resources. These ignorant individuals do not know anything about the well thought through macro nature conservation principles and processes we have successfully employed since the early 1960s. These principles and processes have resulted in the outcome that wild game in Southern Africa presently are back at the numbers they were 250 years ago.

Before we declared ourselves independent from those colonial powers South Africa - as an example - had, due to silly game laws, virtually no more game animals left outside the National Parks. Presently there are between two and a half million and three million game animals of all species on private property – six times as many as inside the national game reserves.

Listing specific species in its two Appendices, CITES has mostly and directly made poaching of some species immensely profitable which in turn has spawned and driven illicit trading to having become an internationally fueled black market of demand and supply. As will be shown in a follow-up presentation, the countries with the highest and growing numbers of species like elephant, rhino, giraffe, zebra and lion have been declined any weighted vote on the conservation status of these animals. In fact they have to abide by the illogical, emotionally driven listing and management plans of various Non- Government Organisations in the USA and elsewhere.

The present and well-known successful macro management concept of nature conservation was achieved in Southern Africa since we declared ourselves independent from Colonial rule in the early 1960s. Presently there is a new effort by old Colonial powers via CITES to again take control of Southern Africa’s immense wildlife resources. The time has come for Southern Africa countries to again turn our backs on these neo-colonial efforts and divorce ourselves from CITES.

Visiting hunters from all over the world who have experienced the Southern Africa wildlife numbers and well organised hunting and hosting may wish to add their voices to those who wish to formally attack CITES about their ineffective and mostly counter productive standing in Southern Africa and elsewhere.

In the following missives the facts will be presented which support the above views.

Disclosure: This missive in three posts is an expanded rendering and commentary on a report by free lance journalist Ivo Vegter that first appeared in “The Liberal Alternative” online news medium. Mr. Vegter's objective, pointed reporting of news facts echoes that of The Liberal Alternative news medium. I am indebted to him for highlighting an important issue in the field of hunting and nature conservation.