CITES: TECHNICAL COMMITTEES PROGRESS WORK

The Plants and Animal Committees under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) recently met in Geneva, where they successfully completed technical groundwork on politically sensitive issues such as trade in economically valuable timber species.

The seventeenth meeting of the Plants Committee (PC17) and the twenty-third meeting of the Animals Committee (AC23) met from 15-19 and 19-23 April. The two bodes held a joint session on 19 April.

CITES is the international convention tasked with regulating trade in endangered species. The Plants and Animal Committees meet every one to two years to discuss progress in the management of the wildlife trade.

Plants Committee tackles timber

The Plants Committee managed to undertake important scientific work on timber without getting caught up in politics -- a key dimension of the discussions at the last meeting of the CITES Conference of the Parties (COP; see Bridges Trade BioRes, 22 June 2007, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/07-06-22/story2.htm).

On bigleaf mahogany, which is a valuable traded species, the Committee heard updates and considered recommendations made by an International Workshop of Experts on non-detriment findings (NDFs) The Plants Committee adopted essential elements for NDF formulation including an estimation of range areas, population parameters, and management principles which can contribute to a useful methodology in the improvement of NDFs on bigleaf mahogany.

Participants also discussed volumetric conversion of standing trees to exportable mahogany sawn wood. In order to improve compliance with CITES it was felt necessary to revise and standardise the conversion factors for standing timber and export grade mahogany wood volumes. Different countries were using different systems of measurement exporting more wood than allowed, which meant that good governance of the forest sector in producer countries and the development of the export trade and forest industry in general were affected negatively. The Plants Committee recommended the adoption of the document on volumetric conversion regarding it as a useful methodology for improving the management of export quotas, whilst noting the present existence of a wide variation in potential results and methodologies for determining volumetric conversion factors in the different countries.

The PC agreed to include bigleaf mahogany in the Review of Significant Trade. A Review of Significant Trade compels countries to review their trade in specified species, in order to assess implementation problems and propose solutions to these problems. The group recommended that the review be limited to those parties that are not correctly implementing Article IV (Regulation of Trade in Specimens of Species included in Appendix II) of the Convention. A working group was formed to identify such countries, and selected Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Venezuela, and Santa Lucia for a Review of Significant Trade in bigleaf mahogany.

The next Plants Committee will be held in Argentina in February 2009.

Sharks and fish at animals meeting

The Animals Committee discussed, among other, conservation measures for dolphins, sharks and sturgeon -- the fish that produces the luxury product caviar. All species are commercially valuable.

The Committee selected the Solomon Islands population of bottlenose dolphins for inclusion in the Review of Significant Trade. However, the actual review was postponed until the next Animals Committee, and in the meantime further research will be undertaken.

With regard to sharks, the Committee recommended that a customs data model to assess the trade in the species should be created. Parties were also asked to adopt national conservation and management measures of shark species.

On sturgeon and paddlefish, participants decided that the methodology for stock assessment should be reviewed, and that the range states should develop a unified methodology in this regard. Caspian caviar quotas have periodically been suspended due to their threatened status and data challenges (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 19 January 2007, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/07-01-19/inbrief.htm#1).

There was no offer by a party to host the next Animals Committee meeting, which is likely to be held in Geneva, Switzerland.

Joint Session

The joint session of the Plants Committee and Animals Committee (PC/AC) opened on 19 April. Among issues on the agenda, participants discussed transport of live animals and plants. The Committee agreed that CITES members should participate in meetings of other organisations dealing with the topic, such as the International Air Transport Association, but that they could not take decisions on behalf of CITES.

The next Conference of the Parties will take place in Doha, Qatar, in 2010.

Additional resources

For daily reporting and a summary of the meetings, see IISD's Earth Negotiations Bulletin at http://www.iisd.ca/cites/ac23pc17/

ICTSD Reporting; "Wildlife experts meet in Geneva to discuss the future of the South American cedar, mahogany, sharks, sturgeons and other species," CITES PRESS RELEASE, 14 April 2008; 'Summary of the 17th Meeting of the CITES Plants Committee, the Joint Session with the Animals Committee and the 23rd Meeting of the CITES Animals Committee: 15-23 April 2008', EARTH NEGOTIATIONS BULLETIN, 28 April 2008.