Diana Kulaga wrote:
So they wouldn't be threatened in their native habitat if more collecting
were allowed? It's acceptable to strip all of the plants out of their
habitat as long as they are freely available to the horticultural trade?

I guess I'd better elaborate. No, I do not find that acceptable. What irks
me is that enforcement of conservation often appears to be aimed more at
researchers and those who would reproduce the plants, whether for sale or to
replenish their numbers in their natural habitat than at poachers. I don't
mean to suggest that poachers are never caught (they are).

But that does not argue for doing away with CITES as so many orchid
growers like to claim. It indicates that enforcement needs to be more
strict.

If the Phrag kovachii saga tells us anything, it is that free trade in
flasked seedlings is insufficient to prevent over-exploitation of wild
populations. Peruvians started flasking P. kovachii soon after it was
discovered, but the known localities were stripped long before those
flasked plants could possibly have matured.

Flasking has been possible since the 1920s, but cheap collected paphs
were on sale in the AOS bulletin as late as the early 1980s. It was
CITES, not flasking, that limited sales of collected Paphs.

If the country doesn't allow them to be sold, there are about 20,000 other
species and 100,000+ hybrids you can grow instead.

No need to be snarky. I think better of you than that.

I'll second Danny's sentiment. No one is gonna die if they can't have
a Paph hangianum or a Phrag kovachii, but we orchid growers spend more
time lamenting that CITES prevents us from growing the latest greatest
species, than we do lamenting the loss of the wild plants. Lets not
forget that the poachers are selling the plants to orchid growers.

Nick