A hiatus in South Africa’s biodiversity legislation, dealing with a proposed national electronic permit system, is inadvertently aiding a run by traffickers on the country’s endangered wildlife.
According to Traffic, the world’s largest wildlife trade monitoring organisation, global wildlife trade was huge, with an annual turnover estimated at billions of dollars and involving hundreds of thousands of individual plants and animals.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) regulates international trade in about 30 000 different species of plants and animals through a system of certificates and permits.
David Newton, Traffic’s national representative to South Africa, said the need for an electronic permitting system was recognised a decade ago, with an entire system developed locally, but not used optimally.
Newton said various excuses, including a lack of finance, were offered for the project’s stagnation.
”It seems as if there is no political will to get it working, but more than likely it is people in the environmental affairs department who are not pushing it,” said Newton.
Environmental affairs department spokesperson JP Louw said a new electronic system would replace a pilot system introduced by the South African Cites implementation project in KwaZulu-Natal and tested in 2004.
The implementation project sought to bring South Africa’s legislation and permitting structures in line with Cites requirements, as little coherence existed in the laws governing the import and export of species after 1994.
”The department’s intention is to have the system up and running at least at trial stage before the end of the year, technology permitting,” said Louw.
”It [the system] will need to be upgraded to become the national system that does not only deal with Cites but all National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (Nemba) permits.
”Whilst the national system is not yet in place, most provinces already have systems in place and our challenge is to integrate these into one national system.”
Louw said Environmental and Tourism Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk would ”in due course” publish regulations that would put into effect the Cites-compliant electronic permitting system.
The regulations related to the lists that were published in terms of Nemba and which include Cites species.
Louw could not provide any of the new system’s specifications or how it would work, saying this, together with cost implications, was still being determined.
Newton of Traffic said that without the ”definite, very big advantages” of the electronic system, pernicious problems such as ”province-hopping” among both local and foreign traders would continue unabated.
Province-hopping refers to the practice of traders who target provinces where the obtaining of permits for trade in endangered species of flora and fauna were not subject to strict control.
Newton said Cites was being managed at a provincial level and the ”system was only as good as the weakest province”, with capacity-constrained Eastern Cape, Free State and Limpopo recognised as problem provinces.
”Electronic permitting brings a level of management that tightens up things considerably and removes the arbitrariness to make decisions at a junior level,” Newton said, adding that the absence of a national Cites permitting system compounded challenges facing wildlife trade management authorities.
In South Africa, recognised as the world’s third most biodiverse country, traffickers were targeting animals and plants for the global exotic pet trade, with forest products, medicines, skins and furs among the main wildlife commodities on the market.
The national permitting system will allow the scientific authority, in this case the SA National Biodiversity Institute, and the management authorities of the department of environmental affairs and tourism and provincial conservation bodies, to improve law enforcement and management, as well as the scientific management of species.
Among the Cites-listed animals in South Africa are elephants, both white and black rhinos, tortoises, great white sharks and some reptiles and birds. In addition, all succulent euphorbia’s, cycads and all African orchids are listed under the flora list. – Sapa