CITES

So, which makes it kind of tough because there's only so many international airports in Canada, which the funny thing is, Ottawa is an international airport, which automatically would be like, well, you're allowed to.

Well, the funny thing is, You need to be an international airport, but you also need to have a CITES CBSA department, which lovely Ottawa does not have a department with animals in it, which means they don't have any CITES people, which means you cannot ship animals out of Ottawa, which is...

I don't know how to say it a really big frustration.

So we have to go out of Montreal or go out of Toronto, which are two pretty big hub.

Border control.

Border control

does the CITES.

So it's freaking hilarious how different it can be.

mean, those are powerful words.

And I think we could... shout out a big call to the Indian government to make sure that the precious botanical and ecological resources that are across India are protected and that the Ayurveda industry is regulated and supported in a way to ensure that any supplements being exported are safely manufactured that it's the correct species they've been tested for any contamination of course there are many reputable ayurvedic companies that are doing a lot of analysis and testing and checking to make sure things are safe um but we spoke about about um hypercholesterolemia earlier and a heart disease And we must call attention to the fact that Google, komiforumukul, which is one of Ayurveda's main herbs, it's a whole category of supplements under, you know, Kaishal, Google, et cetera, that now komiforumukul has gone onto the CITES list.

The CITES list is the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species of Plants and Animals.

And for that to happen... um is is a very sad moment of course just to give a little bit of background google is a member of the mer family and it's a resin that's harvested um from the stem of the of the bush and it is a hard resin to collect and um as it's grown in popularity um that that it's become become used excessively there needs to be much more active sustainable growing projects i think across not just india but the world with regard to this growth in interest in natural medicine and in terms of sustainability and safety i would just want to say that importance of third party validation and ensuring that it's organically certified or if it's from the wild, there is some type of certification with Fair Wild.

And I really think that from Herbal Reality as a community, we would really call out to governments to implement some of the global conservation demands that are being made.

I can now point to stuff where it's actually been not relied upon for management decisions per se, but it's been a part of those conversations.

Like in the recent CITES listings of different deepwater sharks, that paper shows up among maybe 10 or 15 other papers that are part of that push to list them and restrict international trade.

So that's been really cool.

That's the first time in my life where I feel like some of the science I've done has really... contributed towards something at a broader level so hopefully there's more of that but it takes a long time

I understand Africa very well.

serving the Professional Hunters Association at CITES level and at all these formal engagements, international and locally, and having a very strong relationship with all outfitters across the range states and working very closely with organizations.

I said to Dr. Como a while back, it feels quite strange now.

I used to attend AWCF as a participant and now I'm the organizer.

So you have governing bodies.

So you have like CITES, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

It's very long, but it's an organization.

Their job essentially is to work with governments and to onboard countries.

They do population surveys.

They work with the governments to try to figure out, is this population increasing? Is it decreasing? What are the threats there? Is there illegal trade with rhinos or you know, fur or it depends on what it is.

So you have CITES is kind of a governing body and they'll, you know, the government itself will then issue export permits.

So when you hunt an animal, the government issues you a license.