Analysis:

Summit laws unable to protect most endangered species

Hawksbill turtles stayed on the highest level of protection under the CITES treaty this year

May 11, 2000
Web posted at: 4:06 PM EDT (2006 GMT)

By Gary Strieker

NAIROBI, Kenya (CNN) -- The big meeting has ended here. Important decisions were made to protect many endangered plants and animals, including elephants, whales and sea turtles, and it's tempting to think that the result was real progress in saving the Earth's web of life.

But do we really have cause to celebrate?

The meeting was the Eleventh Conference of Parties under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (the "CITES" treaty), one of the world's most important agreements on species conservation.

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Since the treaty was adopted in 1973, some 150 nations have signed it, and most of them send delegations to the conferences that are held every two years.

The last time I covered a CITES conference, it was also in Nairobi. Then, in 1989, delegates met in an atmosphere of crisis, focused on a wave of ivory poaching that had wiped out half of Africa's elephants in a decade. That was the conference that decided to give elephants the treaty's highest level of protection on its Appendix I, the list of species threatened with extinction which may be affected by trade.

Despite the CITES treaty, elephants are still threatened in Africa due to demand for meat and ivory

The legal effect of the Appendix I listing was that all international trade in elephant products, including ivory, was banned under the CITES treaty. During the trade ban, many elephant populations have started to recover, and the most heated debate at this year's conference was on the question whether it is now safe to "downlist" some elephant populations, allowing a limited, controlled trade in ivory.

There were similar debates on whales and hawksbill turtles, also listed on Appendix I. In each case, there were those who argued that the animals in question are no longer in danger of extinction. They say "sustainable use" of them is justified and would in fact promote the conservation of the species by giving them an economic value. Listening to them, I thought their arguments were convincing.

But also, in each case, there were convincing opponents to downlisting. They argued that any authorized trade would provide cover for poachers to launder illegal ivory or whale meat or turtle shells. Any legal trade, they say, would trigger killing sprees that could wipe out the species before anything could be done to reverse the damage.

In the end, opponents of downlisting succeeded in keeping elephants, whales and hawksbills on Appendix I, at least for the time being. The losers on those issues were nations with too many elephants, like Botswana and Zimbabwe; whaling nations like Norway and Japan; and Cuba, now stuck with a warehouse full of turtle shells it can't sell for much-needed hard currency.

All those decisions, of course, could be reversed at the next CITES conference. This is the way the CITES mechanism is supposed to work. Everything depends on the status of the species and how it might be affected by international trade. There's not supposed to be much sentimentality about it. If a species is doing well and is not threatened by trade, there should be no trade restrictions on it, according to CITES.

Three species of sharks, including great whites, failed to get on the protected list at the summit

Most debates at the CITES conferences are about those two questions: Is the species threatened with extinction? If so, how would it be affected by international trade? And in every debate it's surprising to see how many different opinions you can find among all the experts on that particular animal or plant. Very few items on the CITES agenda have clear-cut, right-or-wrong solutions. Almost every decision at the conference involves compromise and trade-offs between opposing sides. It's international diplomacy at work for conservation, achieving results that actually succeed in the real world of politics and economics.

Under the circumstances, just about everyone agrees that CITES has worked very well for more than 25 years. Because of the treaty, many endangered species have undoubtedly been rescued from the brink of extinction -- not just elephants and whales and marine turtles, but also many obscure species ranging from the long-tailed marsupial mouse to the monkey-puzzle tree.

So it's a good thing that CITES is actually functioning as it was designed to function. Without it, the crisis of mass extinction would certainly be even worse. But as I asked earlier, do we really have cause to celebrate?

The fact is, most of the extinction crisis is taking place inside national boundaries, unaffected by international trade. In Indonesia, forests are burning over thousands of square miles every year, killing everything inside. In Cameroon, hunters are slaughtering gorillas and chimpanzees, selling their meat in city markets. In the Philippines, fishermen using cyanide are wiping out vast areas of coral reefs. There's no international trade in any of these situations, and CITES doesn't apply.

Even elephants aren't really protected by the ban on the ivory trade. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where rival armies clash in the central African rainforest, elephant meat is a prized commodity. Hundreds of elephants are killed every month by soldiers and civilians. A major percentage of Africa's elephants roam inside the Congo's boundaries, and if the people there want to kill every last elephant inside their boundaries, there's nothing that can be done under international law to stop them.

CITES is a wonderful example of what can be done by the international community to deal with a small part of the extinction crisis. But it's really the easiest part. The massive effort needed to stop the rampant destruction of the world's biological resources hasn't even started yet. It's going to take a global commitment and a lot of money from the rich nations to make it happen.

When you look at it that way, how much real progress resulted from the big meeting in Nairobi?

'Our Planet' is an ongoing column on global environmental issues written exclusively for CNN.com by International Correspondent Gary Strieker. His reports air regularly on CNN/U.S. and CNN International.

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CITES
1997 CITES scorecard

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