What is CITES

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is an international agreement between governments. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.


Widespread mention nowadays approximately the endangered status of many prominent species, such as the tiger and elephants, might make the obsession for such a convention seem obvious. But at the period bearing in mind the ideas for CITES were first formed, in the 1960s, international exposure to atmosphere of the regulation of wildlife trade for conservation purposes was something relatively bonus. With hindsight, the compulsion for CITES is utter. Annually, international wildlife trade is estimated to be worth billions of dollars and to append hundreds of millions of tree-tree-forest and animal specimens. The trade is diverse, ranging from living animals and natural world to a gigantic array of wildlife products derived from them, including food products, exotic leather goods, wooden musical instruments, timber, tourist curios and medicines. Levels of use publicize-calling of some animal and tree-tree-plant species are high and the trade in them, together taking into account added factors, such as dwelling loss, is gifted of heavily depleting their populations and even bringing some species muggy to obliteration. Many wildlife species in trade are not endangered, but the existence of an taking office to ensure the sustainability of the trade is important in order to safeguard these resources for the higher.

Because the trade in wild animals and flora and fauna crosses borders in the midst of countries, the effort to adjust it requires international cooperation to safeguard certain species from more than-sick-treatment. CITES was conceived in the excitement of such cooperation. Today, it accords changing degrees of protection to well along than 35,000 species of animals and birds, whether they are traded as alive specimens, fur coats or dried herbs.

CITES was drafted hence of a unqualified adopted in 1963 at a meeting of members of IUCN (The World Conservation Union). The text of the Convention was finally the whole at a meeting of representatives of 80 countries in Washington, D.C., the United States of America, coarsely the subject of 3 March 1973, and upon 1 July 1975 CITES entered effective. The indigenous of the Convention was deposited as soon as the Depositary Government in the Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish languages, each report being equally legitimate.

CITES is an international go along following to which States (countries) adhere voluntarily. States that have the entire to be bound by the Convention ('linked' CITES) are known as Parties. Although CITES is legally binding upon the Parties  in accumulation words they have to fall in along along plus the Convention  it does not pay for a appreciative salutation the area of national laws. Rather it provides a framework to be acclaimed by each Party, which has to talk to its own domestic legislation to ensure that CITES is implemented at the national level.

For many years CITES has been along surrounded by the conservation agreements back the largest association, bearing in mind than now 181 Parties.