Response 5

In Kraft’s discussion of the Natural Resource policy of the US, he devoted a section to the ESA and a short paragraph to CITES, including one sentence on the international black market on animal smuggling. I feel that he severely underplayed this important convention and the issues involved with it. While abroad in Brazil, I heard horrifying stories of finding crates filled with hundreds of endangered birds, many of them already dead, on their way out of the country. Smugglers work with huge numbers of animals, knowing that many will die under the terrible conditions they are put through and banking on the hope that some will survive. This sort of black market smuggling goes on constantly in and out of Brazil and South America, among a variety of other countries.

CITES is a vastly ignored piece of legislation in many countries and there is a severe lack of enforcement and funding. Working with the ESA in one country alone is hard enough to fund and enforce and when this is considered on an international scale, the task seems impossible. However, it is a crucial aspect of protecting the world’s quickly dwindling number of species. There are many questions of how to fund an international treaty (Are there rules of how to gather funds? Is most of the money raised by fining smugglers? Are the fines standardized internationally?), how these funds are decided upon (A percentage of the budget for environmental protection? A certain dollar amount? More or less depending on the country/area of the country?), and how the enforcement is itself enforced (Are countries fined for not having enough guards? Does any organization pay attention to how countries are imposing regulations or if they are at all?).

Kraft gives no attention to any of these issues and gives no insight into how such an international convention is carried out. My first hand experiences have proven to me that the importance of these regulations is vast and every day they are being broken with not enough workers finding the smugglers, not heavy enough fines penalizing them, and not enough research into how their organizations work and how to stop them. So much needs to be done, and so much needs to be explained.