Inuit ramp up bear lobbying
Top leaders prepare for global convention, will appeal to nations on product sales ban
The top two leaders of Canada’s 55,000 Inuit are preparing to make an emotional appeal to the world’s nations to reject a proposed global ban on sales of polar bear products, insisting the planned “uplisting” of the animal on an international conservation treaty would pose “a real and very serious threat to our way of life.”
The draft of a joint letter from Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami president Terry Audla and Inuit Circumpolar Council-Canada president Duane Smith insists that the U.S.-led bid to effectively end international sales of rugs and other objects to sport hunters and collectors would have significant “negative cultural and socio-economic impacts that will critically affect our Inuit communities, families, and harvesters.” The letter was obtained by Postmedia News before being sent to all member states of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species ahead of a pivotal meeting in March in Thailand,
Audla has travelled to Paris and Brussels in recent months as part of an intense lobbying effort to convince European leaders not to back U.S. delegates in their push for a more stringent Appendix I listing for polar bears under CITES instead of its current, less restrictive Appendix II status.
He’s also planning a trip to London in the coming weeks to try to win the British government’s support for a continued
“Our knowledge and awareness of this very important species is rich and in-depth.”
but tightly regulated commercial trade in polar bear products.
Last week, U.K. wildlife advocates unveiled a four-metre statue of a polar bear in downtown London as part of a public campaign to get Britain and other European countries to vote for a CITES uplisting at a meeting of convention signatories in Bangkok that begins on March 3.
“The world is looking to the U.K. to stand up for what is right,” environmental activist Stanley Johnson, a former member of the European Parliament and father of London’s mayor Boris Johnson, said at the sculpture’s unveiling.
“We have a chance to reduce the threat to polar bears, an iconic globally endangered species, by supporting through CITES an international ban on trade in this species,” he added. “Our government should not stand by and do nothing while yet another species is obliterated from the planet.”
But in their draft letter to representatives of CITES nations, Audla and Smith object to claims that polar bear populations are dwindling because of climate change and hunting.
“Our people have coexisted with polar bears in the Arctic for thousands of years,” the Inuit leaders intend to tell delegates. “Our knowledge and awareness of this very important species is rich and in-depth. It is a species that we revere and respect within our cultural values and world view. It is a species we harvest and depend upon for our very own survival.”
In an interview last week with Postmedia News, Audla said he was pleased with the support Inuit communities are receiving from the Canadian government, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, in pressing fellow CITES countries to reject the proposed uplisting, as they did at a previous meeting of signatories.
“Despite the claims made by the animal rights lobby, our people are not witnessing a decline in polar bear populations, but rather the opposite. There are more polar bears than ever before.”