wizzin;586323; said:
as stated already, the USFWS DOES have an interest in an Asian Arowana permit program, as it could be a potential revenue for the USFWS. They have been working on this a lot in the past few years, and I was told by a high ranking USFWS officer that the only thing preventing the legalization is that the range countries provide a plan for species recovery in the wild.
The USFWS has made this clear to the range countries, but they don't have any interest in saving this species in the wild. If the native countries of the Asian Aro would just put together a concrete plan for protecting areas of wild habitat and show that they are working to prevent further loss of wild stock, we could see aros in the us. Will this happen? Who knows. It's up to the range countries.
I do, however, disagree that the USFWS should have any say over what qualifies an overide of CITES. CITES is a worldwide governing agency. As always, the US thinks they are above the rest of the world. The US thinks they have say over everything. I don't know why they don't realize they are sustaining the black market of non-tagged fish by keeping the ban though.
While we agree that something has to be done for conservation sake, it is a lot easier said then done in this part of the world. For one, there has been no recent census on the population. What some might think as endangered might already have been so severely depleted that there is close to nothing left.
Secondly, there is a lot of area to enforce this protection net over. In some areas, it's so remote, accesibility is not for the faint hearted.
Then, there is a question of the corrupt practices in this region that would severely hinder the restocking of the population. Sooner or later, whatever is put back into the system will come back out. This will be especially true when things have died down & forgotten.
All the farms involved will have to agree to restock the population willingly. They are strongly resisting what they deem as "tax" on their stocks. Smaller farms would also protest severely since they have no leverage. Also with the amount of line breeding they have been doing to aros, these "enhance" stock might not survive so readily in the wild.
In countries like Malaysia & Indonesia where these aros originate from, restocking might be possible. However, Singapore is a big producer as well. As far as I can verify, Singapore never had aros so the condition of restocking cannot be held against them. I have been told that the recent meeting between the Singapore & States official was more on the lines of bilateral trade to include aros. However, what is the outcome remains to be seen in 2007.
