A U.S.-based cultural organisation has started asking some tough questions about what’s wrong with CITES – the UN’s designated international wildlife trade regulating agency. Nothing at all, if judged by other United Nations agencies.
It functions efficiently, organises meetings effectively, responds to assignments quickly, and keeps its member states fully informed.
So if there is nothing “wrong” with CITES as an organisation, why does it draw such sharp and constant criticism from its wildlife-rich and elephant-overpopulated Southern African members as well as a number of outside observers?
The answer, according to Godfrey Harris, the Managing Director of the Los Angeles-based Ivory Education Institute, is that “the essence of the organisation’s activities have been captured by non-governmental forces. These forces dictate what CITES does and how it does it.”
Harris continued: “Take a vote at the recently concluded 19th CITES Conference of the Parties (CoP19). The 184-member states meeting in Panama voted to create a one-shoe-size-fits-all ban on the export of live elephants.
“They did this at the behest of the European Union.
“Its delegate, representing the union’s member states suggested making the ban ‘temporary’ – the Union’s subtle way of continuing colonial-style European control of African elephant policy while keeping the elephant over-populated states of southern Africa within the CITES family and the Western non-profit organisations, who need elephant issues to stimulate their fundraising activities, happy.”
Harris, a former U.S. diplomat and management advisor to the late President Lyndon Johnson, notes that from a diplomatic perspective, the concept of a “temporary” ban was a clever ploy.
