It took 18 years, but CITES finally has a draft document entitled Guidance on maximising benefits to Indigenous peoples and local communities from trade in CITES-listed species. It is awful.
In 1999, Germany proposed listing the southern African medicinal plant Devil’s Claw on Appendix II of the CITES treaty, which would have subjected the trade to international regulation and oversight.
What interest Germany had in the flowering plant, or what business it had to dictate to range countries (South Africa, Botswana and Namibia) how to manage it, remains a mystery to this day.
There was no evidence that the plant was threatened with extinction in the first place. It is not listed at all on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, for example.
To add to the controversy, the listing would have had ‘a severe impact on the livelihoods of thousands of very poor harvesters who depend on the trade in Devil’s Claw to provide them with a small but vital cash income’.
Rejected
The 11th Conference of the Parties (CoP11) held in the year 2000 in the posh expatriate enclave of Gigiri in Kenya, rejected the proposal, but did commission a report on the plant.
That report was duly tabled at CoP12 in Santiago, Chile, in 2002. It ‘did not examine the livelihoods aspect of the trade in Devil’s Claw, although it did briefly mention the exploitation of marginalised harvesters’.
The authors of that report concluded that despite the additional information they had gathered, ‘the overall population status of the plant was still unknown’, and that ‘the available information suggested that it would not be classified as threatened using the Red List criteria of the IUCN’.
Still, CoP12 adopted several decisions supposedly intended to promote ‘sustainable resource use and fair trade’.
The rejection of the Devil’s Claw listing proposal raised a modest debate, however, on what has become known simply as ‘livelihoods’ among CITES member countries.
At CoP13 in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2004, the assembled delegates passed a resolution that recognised ‘that implementation of CITES-listing decisions should take into account potential impacts on the livelihoods of the poor’.
Two decades
Almost two long decades have passed. To put that in perspective, in 2004, I was a technology journalist in my early 30s, both Facebook and Gmail were launched, Janet Jackson experienced a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Superbowl, Ronald Reagan died, Kanye West released his debut album, Elon Musk made his first investment of $6.5 million in a small startup called Tesla Motors, and Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her role in Monster. It was a long time ago.
It took CITES that long to compile a draft document, slickly titled Guidance on maximising benefits to Indigenous peoples and local communities from trade in CITES-listed species, which was tabled at CoP19, which ends today in Panama.
The document shows that the organisation’s Secretariat hasn’t bothered to read the reports it commissioned, and has asked for a few more years to do so. It is also still gathering new case studies, commissioning reviews, exploring possibilities, engaging indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), and producing short film showcases.
Livelihoods
One would have thought the need to be concerned about local livelihoods would have been obvious all along, but it wasn’t.
In its draft Guidance document, the Secretariat pointedly notes: ‘CITES was established to address the conservation of biodiversity – ensuring international trade in wild animal and plant species is ecologically sustainable – not the livelihoods of people dependent on that trade.’
Well, glad they cleared that up. If they ruin your livelihood, they’re not responsible. But never mind, it doesn’t really matter anyway, because most species regulated by CITES are ‘not widespread, abundant and/or highly used relative to many other wild species of commercial value’.
That must be a relief to the millions of people dependent on the trade in wild plants and animal products.
It is from this high-handed and dismissive basis that the Secretariat reluctantly concedes that, ‘Nevertheless, the trade in some CITES-listed species may play a significant role in the livelihoods of people at the local level’, and ‘CITES recognises that benefits derived from wildlife use can act as an incentive for conservation.’
Local people in range states have been telling CITES this for decades, but their complaints have fallen on deaf ears, just like the proposal to amend voting procedures so that range states are allocated votes in proportion to the size of the populations for which they are responsible.
‘Vested interests’
The draft Guidance document speaks of ‘Indigenous peoples and local communities’, conveniently acronymised as IPLCs. What makes IPLCs special and distinct from regular citizens, CITES leaves as an exercise to the reader.
It soon becomes clear, however, that IPLCs stand in contrast to ‘powerful vested interests that resist devolution of resource rights’.
Using recognisably socialist parlance, the Guidelines recommend that ‘individual harvesters, collectors, and hunters’ begin ‘organising and consolidating into cooperatives, associations, and federations’, to ‘help strengthen them against external, powerful interests that may seek to access their resources or infringe their rights’.
The more common and by far the most successful form of cooperative organisation between people, namely the limited-liability company, is shunned. ‘Vested interests’ are meant to refer to private commercial outfits such as wildlife ranches and game reserves.
CITES wants the ‘enabling environment’ to exclude them from conservation efforts, in order to ‘help ensure that the distribution of benefits is equitable, captured at the most local level and does not work against the poorest sectors of society’.
Technocracy
To achieve this socialist conservation utopia, the Guidelines offer 100 pages worth of complex, top-down, central planning technocracy. This technocracy would not only ‘organise IPLCs’, but also ‘identify viable business opportunities for IPLCs’.
Since when are governments, international agencies or non-governmental organisations capable of doing so at all?
Identifying viable business opportunities is the function of risk-taking investors in private entrepreneurship in a free market, where good ideas are rewarded with profit, and bad ideas fail so the capital invested in them can be redeployed to the good ideas.
The CITES Guidance proposes exactly the sort of technocracy that the communist idealists of the Soviet Union believed would equitably allocate resources from each according to his ability, and to each according to his needs.
The document recognises that the ‘challenge in implementation’ is proving to be the biggest hurdle to realising benefits to IPLCs. It fails to recognise that a lack of implementation capacity of technocratic schemes of wildlife management and trade will be a perpetual and unresolvable difficulty for poor and middle-income range states. It would fail even in rich countries, as all central planning schemes do.
Denied agency
The Guidance document, 18 years in the making, is ideologically far-left, hopelessly idealistic and patronising. It denies agency to the people it is supposed to benefit by dictating how they and their livelihoods ought to be managed by governments and international agencies to give adequate effect to the dictates of CITES.
The organisation has shown a deplorable lack of urgency in addressing long-standing objections from range states about local livelihoods.
And when the citizens of range states demand that their sovereignty over their own livelihoods be restored, and their wildlife conservation and management decisions be respected, the CITES Secretariat simply says ‘no’.
CITES has never been serious about the freedom of people to pursue their livelihoods and manage their own wild plant and animal resources. With these Guidelines, it is headed down a path that will end in tears.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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