Archived press release

Mahogany fails to get cites listing

18 June 1997

The proposal to include mahogany on Appendix II of CITES, the global convention on trade in endangered species, was defeated at the CITES conference in Harare late today (18 June), despite the fact that the majority of those voting supported the listing.

Although 67 countries voted in favour of the proposal, 45 voted against and 9 abstained,and the proposal failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for approval. The defeat comes after intensive last-minute lobbying by Brazil, the world's major exporter and the main source of mahogany traded in the UK.

However, although Brazil spoke out against the proposal, claiming they had domestic controls in place, after the secret ballot they tried to deflect criticism of their position by announcing that they had abstained from the vote. They called on importers and NGOs to support them in implementing their domestic controls.

On Monday, Friends of the Earth, which has been campaigning for legal controls on the mahogany trade since 1992 and has repeatedly demonstrated the failure of current measures, issued a press release saying they would stop their call for a consumer boycott of mahogany and cooperate with Brazil if the Appendix II listing went ahead. A listing on Appendix II of the CITES convention would have required exporting countries to demonstrate that the timber had been produced legally and sustainably, and would have helped traders and governments work towards a sustainable trade.

The defeat of the proposal is extremely bad news for the future of the Amazon rainforest,and means a renewal of calls for a consumer boycott of mahogany.

Sarah Tyack of Friends of the Earth, attending the CITES conference in Harare, said:
"It is a tragedy that this major opportunity to control and manage the mahogany trade has been missed, despite the fact that the majority of countries voting supported introduction of the measures. Since this attempt to get multilateral,legal regulation of the trade has failed, Friends of the Earth will renew its campaign for a boycott of this unsustainably and often illegally produced timber."

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