190 Plants removed from the purview of the Biological Diversity Act 2002 as

Normally Traded commodities

Environment Support Group

1572, Sapthagiri, 100 feet Ring Road,

Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore-70

Tel:91-80-26713559/60www.esgindia.org

190 plants declared Normally Traded Commodities

• In 2010, MoEF and NBA notified 190 plants as Normally Traded Commodities per Sec 40 of BD Act, without any compliance with the Principle of Prior and Informed Consent

• On review, we discovered at least 15 plants were critically endangered, or threatened, a fact confirmed by IUCN.

• Trade is a major cause for extinction of species.

• The NTC list is thus comprehensively violative of various national and international regulations.

More species on IUCN Red List• The case of a fish Puntius

denisonii, also known as Miss Kerala, is indicative of the threat that exists to species from trade.

• Miss Kerala, discovered as a collector’s item in the 1996 Rome Aquarium Congress, has by 2010 come close to extinction due to commercial trade.

• IUCN has now placed it on the Red List - nearing extinction.

• Similarly, unfettered trade in endangered plants could drive them into extinction.

Is NTC clause a gateway to species extinction?

• "India Losing Rare Medicinal Plants", published on the front page of The Asian Age, 14th February, 2010, in which Jairam Ramesh is quoted to have said that "a five-year moratorium should be placed on the export of all raw materials in order to save these plants from extinction” while admitting “annually, Rs. 800 crores worth of rare medicinal plants are being exported in raw form. These plants then get re-imported back into the country as medicines which are sold at much higher prices.“

• Yet no action has been taken to review listing 190 plants as Normally Traded Commodities – over two years since we filed the complaint against the decision

Loss of species

• Twenty-one percent of all known mammals, 30 percent of all known amphibians,12 percent of all known birds, 35 percent of conifers and cycads, 17 percent of sharks and 27 percent of reef-building corals assessed for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ are threatened with extinction.

http://www.iucnredlist.org

"If the world made equivalent losses in share prices there would be a rapid response and widespread panic, as we saw during the recent economic crisis. The loss of biodiversity, crucial to life on earth, has, in comparison, produced little response," said Jackson. "By ignoring the urgent need for action we stand to pay a much higher price in the long term than the world can afford." - IUCN

Plant species that have been listed in the Normally Traded commodities also listed on other lists of

Threatened and endangered species• BSI Negative Plant List- 2• ENVIS Negative list-1• Karnataka Medicinal Plants Authority-4• National Medicinal Plants Board-6• ENVIS List of threatened Plants-1• Ministry of commerce notification- 6