More protection for elephants, great white sharks and valuable tropical trees, but less money to pay for it.
That was the glum assessment of the head of a U.N. organization charged with overseeing a global treaty regulating trade in animals and plants.
Delegates to the 166-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Bangkok, which ended on Thursday, voted to boost protection for scores of species.
But they rejected a request by the CITES secretariat for a 10 percent budget increase and approved a rise of just 3 percent to just under $5 million for the next three years.
“Lots of things to do and less money to do it. It’s a million dollars less over the next three years,” CITES Secretary General Willem Wijnstekers told Reuters as the two-week meeting ended.
The Bangkok meeting made key decisions to regulate trade in commercially valuable tree species such as ramin, a tropical wood used in furniture and pool cues, and coveted fish such as the great white shark and humphead wrasse.
The meeting also pledged to ramp up the fight against wildlife crime, said to be the second greatest threat to endangered animals and plants after habitat destruction.
Lack of resources
But Wijnstekers said these new decisions would be hard to implement because of a lack of resources, especially in developing countries with little spare money or other resources of their own.
“There is no room for an increase in our activities despite the fact that the demands and decisions taken here charge us with more and more things,” he said.
It’s a big concern for Liberia, an impoverished West African country emerging from more than a decade of civil war.
“Our parks system was destroyed and we need help to build our capacity,” said Anthony Jarbo Taplah, a senior official of Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority which relied on CITES aid to send its two-member delegation to Bangkok.
CITES, credited with saving the African elephant after a 1989 trade ban on ivory, is supposed to conduct a survey of African countries where ivory is sold in unregulated markets.
“In order to do that we need money to travel and that has been cut as well,” Wijnstekers said.
Communicating rules and regulations to treaty members will also be reduced to posting them on the treaty’s Web site instead of providing hard copies.
“Developing countries complain they don’t have adequate access to Internet. Some of them came here without documents,” he said.