What good is CITES, anyway?

The Committee on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) might be better known now as (for example):

Committee to Insure Tuna is Eliminated Summarily

Cooperation Indicates Total Environmental Surcease

Catastrophic Insiders Triumph: Eat Sushi

Consumer Ingestion = Tragically Empty Seas


They've proven to be pretty much useless to prevent anything. Yes, another reason (one of the best) for world government; laws from a world governmental body might actually get passed and have enforcement capability. As I know I've said before, the much-reviled (by conservatives who want to pave their land and sell it too) Endangered Species Act really puts limits on what people can do to endangered species when a species is really endangered -- even though getting a species classed as endangered is hard, and when the species is really in that category the situation isn't looking too good.

Most recently, CITES let Japan push them around again, and they were unable to put any protections on rare corals, and pretty much nothing on sharks, either:

CITES chooses 'commerce' over sharks, leaving endangered species vulnerable


"Once again, Japan led the opposition to regulating the trade in white-tipped sharks and scalloped hammerheads, including two look-alike species: the great hammerhead and the smooth hammerhead. Japan has dominated the CITES meeting, successfully leading resistance to banning the trade in the Critically Endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna and against monitoring the coral trade."

Further down in the article:

"Governments at CITES have in the past had a good track record of protecting rare species, but can they rise to the challenge of protecting species which are now seriously depleted, and simultaneously worth a lot of money? Sadly, the signs from this meeting are not good. It’s clear that more and more governments attending CITES are not trying to protect species, but safeguard what they see as 'commodities' that they can continue trading," concluded Knowles, adding that "proposal after proposal designed to protect massively overfished marine species have failed to pass at CITES. It’s an appalling result, the impacts of which will effect our marine environment for generations to come."

Coming soon to an aquarium near you: the only place you can see what coral reefs used to look like, actual swimming bluefin tunas, and a couple of benign sharks.

Is it really worth it?