Plant Importation and Lacey Act Provisions (Hannon)
Tom Mitchell (Sun, 12 Oct 2008 03:04:21 PDT)

Collecting plant material in the wild and trading it internationally
is a vexed issue from both legal and ethical perspectives. I find it
helpful to separate the two perspectives - what ought we do and what
the law says we must do - when trying to figure out my own position.
A third perspective - the pragmatic question what happens in the real
world - further muddies the waters.

Of course, I have a vested interest - I collect seeds in the wild and
would like to be able to exchange them with friends and sell them to
customers internationally, including in the USA, ideally without
breaking the law. This makes it terribly hard to remain objective.
There are good arguments on both sides of the opinion divide and one
must resist cherry-picking those that suit.

Ethically, the only serious objections to unregulated wild collecting
that I have encountered are: (a) the danger of bringing about
extinction of wild populations through over-collecting; (b) the risk
of introducing invasive species and (c) the risk of inadvertently
introducing diseases. There isn’t space to go into the reasons but,
personally, I reject as totally specious arguments that genetic
material ‘belongs’ to the temporary geopolitical entity in which it
happens to be located at the moment it is collected.

These are all arguments for intelligent regulation, not arguments
against the trading of plants. The difficulty with regulation is that
the individuals appointed to do the regulating are usually inadequate
to the task. In many developing countries no authority exists that is
adequately resourced to regulate plant exports or, if it does, its
officers are typically corrupt. If we were to insist that only
exporters with a valid permit were allowed to export plants, what
we’d in fact end up with is exporters capable of paying the largest
bribes.

At the import end, things are often no better. In Australia, for
example, it is legal to import seeds of Helleborus x hybridus but
illegal to import seeds of Helleborus orientalis. Go figure. The
point though, is that there ain’t a customs officer on earth who
could tell the difference between the two. So, again, if we insist
that all plant material is inspected and ‘passed’, quantities of
plant material that isn’t what it claims to be will enter the
importing countries.

Ironically, those few people competent to regulate plant exports and
imports with respect to the identity and conservation status of the
plants in question are often the collectors themselves.

Which brings me to the legal perspective. Laws governing
international trade are constructed by bureaucrats to be the least
bad compromise among the wishes of powerful vested interests in the
treating countries. One can feel pretty confident that the views of
PBS members were not high on the list of priorities of the
signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity.

My attitude to these laws, therefore, is that they should be treated
with a healthy degree of contempt. Anyone who finds this attitude
shocking might ask him or herself whether he has ever broken the
speed limit (illegally endangering life), taken a pinch of seed from
someone else’s garden (theft), or failed to declare income on a tax
return (tax evasion). Of course, we should aspire to influence our
legislators to make better laws, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the end, what happens in the real world is a messy compromise.
Most members of the PBS list want to grow plants that are native to
other plants of the world. Those that want to grow only native plants
should try living in a country that was under half a mile of ice a
few thousand years ago.

Personally I advocate self-regulation. Gardeners, like hunters, make
good conservationists. We want the habitats where our plants
originated to be conserved. An anecdote illustrates my point. In May
this year, I collected a small piece of Actaea spicata rhizome from a
large colony growing by a roadside in Slovenia. I went back to the
site last week in the hope of collecting seed. The place is now a car
park. I was rather upset by this and not because I’d missed out on
the seed I’d hoped to collect. The only surviving plant of this
colony in the world is now in my garden, from whence, properly
labeled and vegetatively propagated, it could eventually be re-
introduced to the wild.

The flora of the Balkans is threatened by post-war reconstruction and
by development as more countries accede to the European Union. These
developments are warmly welcomed by most local people. The flora is
not in the least threatened by my collecting activities, nor by the
few other enthusiasts who bumble around the region in search of
interesting plants.