News

In their usual bid to avoid transparency, the CITES delegates voted to KEEP secret ballots in spite of much opposition from the conservation community. In fact, even the vote on the secret ballots was secret… CITES is a UN organization at the end of the day, funded with our taxes. Secret ballots are not part of the UN procedure, but CITES, in their arrogance, loves it. Why? Because your delegation, charged by you to perhaps vote in certain ways, can hide behind influence peddling and deals made in corridors. CITES is a trade organization after all, and one hand washes the other.

There also seems to be a huge furore developing over a rather straightforward proposal by the USA and the Russian Federation to uplist polar bears to CITES appendix I. No more international trade. Canada, the WWF, Denmark, Norway and even the CITES Secretariat oppose for a diversity of reasons.  They either say that polar bears are already accurately protected nationally (Norway, Denmark) or they say that the polar bear slaughter must continue (at least 600 “legal” bears per year in Canada and about 200 poached per year in Russia and then laundered through the Canadian system). Canada claims that the Inuit people (Eskimos) have a tradition of hunting polar bears and that these poor communities must not be deprived of their income and traditional practices. Nice that Canada is now paying attention to her indigenous people, long ignored and marginalized in terms of education, health care, integration into society, etc. Actually, what happens is that these Inuits are selling their polar bear quotas to trophy hunters from all over (China is now a big fan of polar bear trophies) and selling skins from bears harvested under “traditional practice” allowances. If the Inuit people want to harvest polar bears as a traditional right let them do so. But entering into international commerce should not be tolerated.

It seems the EU is now proposing a compromise instead of addressing the issue head-on. The EU swing vote defeated the polar bear uplisting at the last Conference of Parties in 2010.

The compromise proposed is this:

Instead of uplisting, let’s delay action until we can have proper polar bear population counts and an assessment of commercial offtake versus conservation needs. This is sounding very familiar. Kenya proposed uplisting the African lion to Appendix I in 2004. The proposal was watered down by CITES – instead, let’s have regional meetings and some sort of population assessment. Kenya agreed, the meetings took place, and nine years later we are still no further in terms of an organized lion conservation programme, but we have lost a lot more lions. It will be the same with polar bears.

How many meetings, conferences, discussions and diversions do we need to finally agree that polar bears are in sharp decline, will decline further due to climate change in the future? But meanwhile let’s hunt another 800 bears per year while CITES dithers? And let Canada fudge their CITES documents to include poached polar bears from Russia into the international trade?

It boggles the mind what is happening at the CITES meeting in Bangkok. It is all smoke and mirrors to be able to continue just as before. The big discussions on rhinos and elephants have yet to take place. But already they have said science is not important, transparency is not important, and every issue on the table can be delayed and obfuscated until the cows come home. And cows are exactly what we will have left in the future instead of our disappearing wildlife heritage.

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