Nick,

Interesting points - but the one thing that kept popping up in my head:

Do *YOU* want the same "take-no-prisoners war-on-drugs" federal enforcement
officers knocking down your doors and trashing your greenhouse because
someone "reported" you as having some of these banned plants you are
advocating? The number of innocent people KILLED during mistaken drug raids
is well documented - are you ready to die for your orchids?

Extreme examples, I know, but I put them out to make people stop and think.

-Eric in SF
www.orchidphotos.org

wrote in message
oups.com...
Kenni Judd wrote:
While you're correct that CITES technically doesn't stop all
_legal_orchid
trade, it makes it far less profitable. I will also agree that a big
portion of this problem is sloppy, inconsistent, and often just plain
WRONG
enforcement. Meanwhile, I don't think it's doing much, if anything at
all,
to stop the _illegal_ trade, but is if anything making the latter _more_
profitable for those willing to take the [so far, relatively remote]
likelihood of being caught. Just my 2 cents, Kenni

To some extent, I agree with this, but I think that the answer is not
to make legal trade easier. That will have limited effect on smuggling.
Rather, to reduce smuggling, we may need to reduce the international
trade in orchids and increase enforcement of CITES.

If you look at old advertisements, I think you will find that slipper
prices increased and flasked seedlings became more common after Paphs
and Phrags were placed on Appendix 1 in 1989. Flasking is relatively
expensive and labor intensive, so collected plants can often be sold
more cheaply than flasklings. Strict regulation of imports was
required to make domestic slipper flasking economically viable, even
though the technology had been around for decades.

Many of the species currently being smuggled are already well
established in cultivation (P. delenatii, Chinese parvisepalums, etc),
but since the people smuggling and the people flasking are different,
the availablility of flasked plants doesn't necessarily inhibit
smuggling. Artificially propagated plants can actually aid poaching by
making it easier to launder the poached plants. For instance, zillions
of venus flytraps are produced by tissue culture, but poaching still
occurs. Joe Poacher can't do tissue culture, but he can still make a
few bucks poaching. Once the plants are in pots, who can tell the
difference between wild and cultured plants?

If we were to further reduce international trade in orchids, it would
have a limited effect on the average orchid grower. Some newly
discovered species and some foreign clones will be harder to obtain,
but most species are already available domestically. Those people who
make their money importing orchids will suffer, but domestic flasking
labs should benefit. For newly discovered species like P. kovachii, ANY
international trade can mask smuggling, so the obvious answer is to
keep the plants out of cultivation, even though it might be fun to grow
one. As long as the plants are not legally in cultivation, smuggled
plants will stick out like a sore thumb.

On the other hand, relaxing CITES regulations on international trade in
artificially propagated plants might paradoxically make poaching more
common. Prices of slipper orchids would be reduced, and relatively
expensive domestically flasked would have a hard time competing with
cheaper imports. The situation would revert to the pre-1989 market,
and collected plants (though making less money per plant), would be
easier to launder through legal import/export channels.

Nick