Al:
From your own Wikipedia link:
"....since most of the plant's forest habitats have been converted to farmland".
Sort of going along with my previous statements. As for the scarcity of the wood, let me ask the following question:
If "....most of the forest habitats have been converted to farmland" what happened to the trees? Were they all burned up? Doubt it. Why is stump wood so easily available compared to trunk wood? If the stumps are there, where it the rest of the tree?
The point being, sure there may be a whole lot of harvested wood, but how's it going to get replaced going forward?
You're talking about harvested wood.
CITES is concerned with ongoing survival of a species,
living trees.
Loss of habitat
IS the problem.
As for the "being applied retroactively", it is, and it is in effect now. One of my luthier buddies deals in guitars. You can no longer ship guitars with rosewood fretboards (not just back and sides), only fretboards, over the border without having them seized. Doesn't matter if the guitar was made in 1953, or in 1923 for that matter. It will get seized. You need to get a "a passport" to ship it.
Again, that's the point, there
is an exemption process.
If seizure was being applied retroactively there
wouldn't even be an exemption process available.
So the rules are being applied retroactively. Same goes for any guitar with a mahogamy back and sides; again, doesn't matter when it was made.
And it'll all get through customs just fine
with the correct paperwork.
All this griping arises from the onerous task of proving a wood's source and waiting for the appropriate certificate where that requirement didn't exist before or was poorly enforced.
Ebony, which is not on the CITES list, is arguably far more endangered than Mahogany, or EI Rosewood.
Madagascan Ebony
is CITES listed as of Dec '11:
https://www.fws.gov/international/plants/current-cites-listings-of-tree-species.html
See article 2 under the scientific name Dyospyros.
Again, I call attention to the letter from the US Fish and Wildlife Service which details how to successfully navigate the new rules.
https://www.fws.gov/international/p...appendix-II-timber-listings-December-2016.pdf
Note the specific distinctions made between personal transport of an instrument and shipment for profit it regardless of quantity, especially in questions 47-50.
I still don't understand your point. Guitars were going across the border freely until January of this year
No they weren't.
They just weren't being scrutinized as carefully.
Anything that was CITES listed before Jan '17 still needed the appropriate certificate, ESPECIALLY Brazilian Rosewood.
Look at the listing dates of the various woods in the listing(S). ANYTHING that was CITES listed before Jan '17 still needed certification, it just wasn't as relevant to guitars back then.
All that happened was that remaining unlisted species of rosewood were added to Article 2 starting in Jan '17.
THAT is the reason for the sudden stricter scrutiny of guitars.
The certification process is a means of proving the guitars were made or the wood was legally imported into country of manufacture
before it became subject to CITES controls.
Another point:
Gibson suffered
2 hugely publicized wood seizures in the last 5 years, one of them predicated on paperwork not being properly filled out by
their customs broker.
A previous one was for EIR fretboard stock not being in conformance with
India's export regs, and the US performing reciprocal enforcement of India's regs.
So this really is nothing new.
Now, everything needs a "passport".
Let's clarify the difference between "passport" which is only available to the owner of an instrument who wants to personally carry his instrument and doesn't intend to sell it, and an export authorization permit which is issued by the government of the country from which a listed species is being exported, stating that the export is legally allowed.
That type of permit is for commercial quantities of materials or any commercial shipment of an individual piece.
The same rules also apply to furniture and there's a known huge asian maker that hasn't always been conscientious about vetting the sources of their raw materials.
Let's not forget as well that a BIG element of illegal trade is exotic
animals, where the profit on an individual may far outclass anything typically made on a guitar sale..
It's just the same processes applied to woods and simply hasn't been a big impact on guitar trade until last January.
If it's coming through via a common carrier (unless you're shipping it to yourself) it automatically needs documentation.
All of a sudden, with the stroke of a pen, all of these previously built guitars are now contributing to species extinction.
That's hyperbole.
Again, I think you're missing the point. All the previously built guitars now require
proof that they were built before the woods they contain were CITES listed.
And that's actually nothing new, it's just that now more types of wood fall under the scope of scrutiny.
All of them have become threats to the Brazilian rainforest.
NO, the unregulated trade of newly listed species is a threat to Madagascan, Caribbean,and SE Asian rain forests.
And please, nobody says the
guitars are a threat, only the
illegitimate harvesters of materials used to make 'em.
Guitars are a mere footnote compared to the furniture trade, which instruments are actually considered to be part of.
And EIR
IS still harvested illegally in SE Asia in spite of the existence of sustainably harvested sources.
So certification allows continued trade in those sources instead of making it all illegal.
And yes, to add more opinion, the Brazilian rosewood trees that were cut down for the farmland are, for the most part, still in existence. I am willing to bet that there is a vast hoard to very high quality trees in a warehouse, or multiple warehouses, in Brazil, and that the Brazilian government knows they are there.
As pointed out above, those aren't trees anymore, they're harvested wood, which may also explain why such tight reigns are being placed on its export, if it can't be replaced.
I'm willing to concede that perhaps there
are plenty of living harvestable trees out there, but the existence of substantial quantities of harvested wood doesn't prove it.
In fact I think now we've been confusing the issue by not making that distinction clear.
What you've been
meaning is: There's tons of
harvest.
I have no reason to doubt that.
What I've been meaning is: "There's substantial loss of habitat", and I have no reason to doubt that, either.
Bu it means that since the current harvested material may not be readily replaced, it IS in shortage, by definition.
The wood suppliers, along with the Brazilian government, are limiting the supply of Brazilian rosewood by keeping export quantities low. The wood dealers get maximum dollars for the wood, and the Brazilian gov't gets to make significant amounts of money issuing permits, and the permits, and the wood itself, continues to increase in value.
And I can't blame anybody for that.
IF what they've got can't be replaced, why
shouldn't they get what the market will bear?
The fact that they're doing that at all still seems to support the fact that there is in fact a shortage due to unsustainable harvesting, that what they sell can't be replaced.
As for the other examples, I won't comment. I can say straight out that more than one guitar has been seized, erroneously, by customs agents, and even though the guitar was completely legal, customs still has it, eight years after seizure, even though lawyers have been involved, and the original manufacturer has the necessary paperwork to prove the guitar is legal.
The way I understand what was sent in the pm, the instrument was shipped into the US without any paperwork identifying the MOP as MOP.
Technically that
was a requirement at the time, but I'm sympathetic to the probability that the need for such paperwork wasn't understood.
I do think it's draconian that the guitar hasn't been releasedin spite of all the subsequent documentation submitted, but if lawyers have tried and failed, I'd suspect there's something else we aren't aware of going on here.
You should not need an exemption certificate for a guitar that is completely legal.
Again, how to
prove it's legal?
And if the customs agents cannot verify that a guitar is legal or not, you need better customs agents, or you need to stop seizing guitars due to ignorance.
NO, it
should be taken out of the customs inspector's discretion.
Thousands of different guitars and hundreds of wood species, I think it's completely unrealistic to expect customs inspectors to be experts in guitar and wood identification.
On top of which, the time consumed in performing that task would be unacceptably costly.
Bite the bullet and get the documentation.
Like I said before it's about the same as getting a driver's license.
Even in today's society, full of fake news, half truths and general bull**** all over the place, legally you are still innocent until proven guilty. When a customs agent is not able to verify that a guitar was built previous to the CITES dates, they should turn it over to somebody who can, not seize it.