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illegal orchids or orchid smuggling.....
I've also read opinions on the OGD that if a species does not have a proper
latin binomial, it is not eligible for CITES export papers. This person then went on to say every orchid discovered after some year in the 80s or 90s and imported into the USA for description is technically fruit of the poison tree and illegal. As you can imagine, that means all newly described species must be described from within the borders of the country they are discovered in before they can be exported to the rest of the world. This mess has also caused some large botanical institutions in the USA to completely stop all plant research outside of the USA. They saw what happened to Selby and are afraid it could happen to them. Well, Friday has come and gone - I hope you were able to write an interesting paper! -Eric in SF www.orchidphotos.org "K Barrett" wrote in message . .. OK as to Kovach and the phrag. As far as I know he didn't have any paperwork at all. No import/export forms filled out correctly or incorrectly, nothing, nada, zilch, zippo. As far as I know he was on vacation, saw this plant in a roadside cart, grabbed it quick! and ran for home. Personally I think he was just so excited he just kept his mouth shut about his discovery and got it home as fast as possible, gave it to Selby for ID, said "name it for me" and split for home to dump is bags and get cleaned up. Never thinking about CITES, only thinking he had something no one had ever seen before! How exciting! Then like you say the doodoo hit the fan and the rest is history. I'm betting you are right about Peru waking up after the fact and getting ticked off about the plant escaping their country. If that hadn't happened I'll bet everyone concerned never would have had to explain a thing. Now, what you say about buying a plant labelled one way and having it actually be something entirely other happens quite alot. Why isn't *that* high crimes and misdemeanors? Just because its not a phrag? K Al wrote: I understood that. I was not confused. I still have always wondered how Kovach went wrong. Was he intentionally smuggling or was he in a gray area where procedures were unclear. An unidentified new Phrag species. What did he declare it was on his permits that allowed it to pass all the way to Shelby and published as newly discovered before the doo-doo hits the big blowing air machine? I am certain he knew he had a new species. I don't know how the permits work on this level. Why didn't he present his new find to Peruvian botanists? I always figured he took it to Shelby because Shelby was the botany department he knew of that could do the work. Your example is one way plants are smuggled, for sure. No names are needed. I sometimes buy recently imported plants from American companies all the time and get unbloomed orchids that bloom out to be other than what they were sold to me as. I have something that came in labeled as Asctm curvifolium and blooms out to be the weirdest little thing. In two flowering now I have been unable to identify it. I don't have a good picture of it yet. The flowers are pin-head sized brown and yellow. It is clearly an orchid of some kind, and probably not new to science, just new to me. I have received some rather rare Phal minus this way too. I bought Phal gibbosa from a man who thought he was selling me Phal gibbosa and when it bloomed and I asked him what it was, he wanted it back. No, I think I'll keep for all those times I bought something rare (not necessarily from this man) and got Phal equestris instead. "K Barrett" wrote in message . .. I knew I'd confuse the issue by mentioning kovachii or any names at all. I'm sorry I ever answered the original question. My answer was in regard to HOW orchids could be smuggled using a CODE. Not about kovachii or anything/anyone else. Substitute X and Y for plant names if you prefer. K Al wrote: With kovachii, I am still a bit confused as to the order it all happened. I don't think he was intentionally smuggling in the manner your hypothetical example suggests it is done. I have always assumed he had the correct specialized permits to import/export already classified Phrags and that he broke the law kind of by accident because it was an undescribed piece of plant material and shouldn't have left Peru, no matter what kind of permit he had. I have always kind of believed that the issue started when Peru discovered one of their native plants had made it into the US to be described by a US authority and that until then, nobody realized the treaty had this kind of gray area in it that would allow undescribed material to be exported so easily. It has always seemed to me that he was in a kind of gray area and not at all doing what you describe below as smuggling. But my assumptions are probably too simplified. He and Selby broke the law, (as decided by the outcome of the court case) but what should they have done differently? What would have been the correct course of action for an American plant collector in Peru to take after discovering a new species of Phrag? What should Selby have done when this unimaginably serendipitous piece of plant material dropped in their lap? K Barrett" wrote in message news:uvadnWF0AbVZXefenZ2dnUVZ_sWdnZ2d@comcast. com... jamiemtl wrote: ok - so im now fascinated with Silva's and Norris' case. Apparently they would get fake permits for legal orchids, then ship illegal ones with these legit permits? It said on the US department of agriculture's website that they even devised a code to determine what these orchids were? Does anyone have any further information? That's why I said this could become a life's work. Its a great story. To answer your question about how this is done. If you were to go to any orchid show you'd see orchids for sale, and mostly they are out of bloom. Yous see just a mass of green plant stuffs. One out of bloom orchid plant - for the most part - looks like any other orchid plant of the same variety. The way we tell them apart is by the tag the vendor puts on the plant. For ease in labelling, vendors will label their plants by number and have a master list as to what all the numbers mean. Then when they get to where ever they are going they'll put a better tag on the plant. So you'll see plants tagged '1167 Soph cernua' and some just '1167' and you as teh purchaser have to know/ask what '1167' is. Pretty much this is standard operating procedure, but to a customs agent or a reporter looking for a story it could look like a "code". Nevertheless, the key to the crime is that one orchid looks pretty much like another of the same variety when its out of bloom. So, your cohort (in the country of origin) writes up a bunch of paperwork saying you two are importing an easy to get plant like Phragmipedium schlimii (an example only). He gets CITES & USFWS (endangered species) permits to import Phrag schlimii. The paperwork says item #123 is Phrag schlimii. But really item #123 is rare, sexy Phrag kovachii (an example only), a plant people would kill for. The customs agents look over his shipment, sees that a bunch of Phrags are coming in, but they really have no idea WHAT they are because one out of bloom phrag looks pretty much like another. You pick up the plants at the customs house. Your cohort has emailed you the real list, stating #123 is kovachii. Bada bing! You're in the money. You contact your friends who you know will want the plants no matter what the cost, and you laugh all the way to the bank. Unless you are George Norris, who - according the the feds - never deleted his email or cleaned his hard drive and they found the trail. Then you wind up in prison. Note: George wasn't busted for Phrag. kovachii, Selby Gardens and Michael Kovach were, I just used those species as an example. I could go on, but its your homework, LOL!! If you can figure out the OGD's search feature you should be able to find Norris's own post about how the feds treated him when they served their search warrant. I thought it was chilling. You may also be able to find an account of how Eurpoean vendors filled the back of a pick up truck with illegally collected Phrag kovachiis to sell in Europe. I guess their customs agents are even worse than ours at plant identification _ I'm kidding the story is more convoluted than that, but there's only so much I can write at one time. K Barrett |
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