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CITES Exempts Rosewood in Instruments
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It sounds like more convenience has been added to your life. :wink:
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Me and every guitar player in the world that crosses international borders. Even when they ship their own stuff, International went dead with cites, a few maple and ebony's but generally even DNA's you didn't want to export, or import. The market had splintered into, EU, US, and countries, rarely legally permitting anything to go outside those lines. The global guitar market will now go back to what it used to, hopefully the customers will follow.
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according to this everything is in effect til Nov 2019, and then musical instruments are exempt.
https://reverb.com/news/cites-restrictions-on-musical-instruments-could-be-coming-to-an-end
https://reverb.com/news/cites-restrictions-on-musical-instruments-could-be-coming-to-an-end
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Interesting. I'm interested in both guitars (most of mine have a rosewood board) and sustainability.
Cites as applied to instruments seems to have been a bureaucratic nightmare. So I'm sure this is good news.
But do guitars really have an environmental impact?
I'm sure little compared to the other chaos in Brazil right now. But still...
Still seems hard to know how to also be ethical about purchase choices, not much info out there really.
Cites as applied to instruments seems to have been a bureaucratic nightmare. So I'm sure this is good news.
But do guitars really have an environmental impact?
I'm sure little compared to the other chaos in Brazil right now. But still...
Still seems hard to know how to also be ethical about purchase choices, not much info out there really.
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Thanks, thats nothing just cool
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I'm interested in both guitars
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To your question, I take this to mean "No."
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Nice post virtual-staging.archicgi.com
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Then that's good news all round and a rare victory for common sense.
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Probably not until late November when the 90 days have passed and the new rules take affect
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Still amazingly stupid this was even a thing.
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CITES Lifts Rosewood Permitting Requirements
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT industry cheered when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) voted at its 18th Congress of Parties held August 18 in Geneva, Switzerland to dramatically reduce the permit requirements for cross-border shipments of instruments containing rosewood. The move effectively reversed a 2016 ruling that required securing an export permit for every instrument exported by manufacturers, as well as instruments carried across national borders for personal use.
Under the newly approved revisions to "Annotation 15," which covers trade in rosewood, instrument manufacturers will still be required to secure CITES permits for all unfinished imported rosewood logs, boards, and veneers. However, completed instruments, instrument parts, and accessories can now be shipped globally without the need for any CITES paperwork. Individuals will also be able to transport their instruments across borders without the need for permits.
In one of the rare instances when the organization actually reduced permitting, the CITES vote was prompted when instrument makers and associations including NAMM, the League of American Orchestras, CAFIM, the European music industry umbrella group, the International Association of Violin and Bow Makers, and the French Musical Instrument Association lobbied CITES to revise Annotation 15 for the past three years. Global customs organizations, overburdened by the permitting requirements, also advocated for streamlining the rosewood rules. In the U.S. alone, the 2016 regulations swamped the Fish and Wildlife Service, as CITES permit requests more than tripled to 60,000 annually.
The CITES rosewood regulations were abruptly put into place in January 2017, taking the music industry by surprise and significantly slowing global trade in guitars, woodwinds, and various stringed instruments as manufacturers scrambled to develop compliance protocols. Larger producers including Fender, Gibson, Martin, and Taylor had the scale to manage the new permitting requirements, but still struggled. Frank Untermyer, supply chain director at Martin Guitars, said the administrative burden on his company "could not be overstated." Scott Paul, director of natural resource sustainability at Taylor Guitars, added that the rosewood regulation was hastily drafted and caused bureaucracies around the world to issue "an obscene amount of permits." Many smaller manufacturers and individual luthiers simply abandoned export markets.
The rosewood regulations were prompted by concerns of over-harvesting tropical hardwood forests, spurred by the surging demand for rosewood furniture in China. However, the CITES committee was unaware of the fact that their permitting regime placed serious burdens on instrument makers and performers. Paul indicated that CITES was receptive to the instrument makers' plea for relief "because we have a solid record of responsibly sourcing wood, and because we willingly supported permitting on unfinished wood." The fact that the music industry accounts for approximately one tenth of one percent of rosewood consumption also had some bearing.
The CITES vote in Geneva is an unalloyed victory for the music industry. All those who trade in guitars, stringed instruments, woodwinds, and even pianos (rosewood is often used in piano hammers) have been freed from a cumbersome administrative burden. However, Paul says the industry shouldn't get complacent. "It's likely that CITES may consider other important wood species," he says. "We need to remain engaged and vigilant."
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT industry cheered when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) voted at its 18th Congress of Parties held August 18 in Geneva, Switzerland to dramatically reduce the permit requirements for cross-border shipments of instruments containing rosewood. The move effectively reversed a 2016 ruling that required securing an export permit for every instrument exported by manufacturers, as well as instruments carried across national borders for personal use.
Under the newly approved revisions to "Annotation 15," which covers trade in rosewood, instrument manufacturers will still be required to secure CITES permits for all unfinished imported rosewood logs, boards, and veneers. However, completed instruments, instrument parts, and accessories can now be shipped globally without the need for any CITES paperwork. Individuals will also be able to transport their instruments across borders without the need for permits.
In one of the rare instances when the organization actually reduced permitting, the CITES vote was prompted when instrument makers and associations including NAMM, the League of American Orchestras, CAFIM, the European music industry umbrella group, the International Association of Violin and Bow Makers, and the French Musical Instrument Association lobbied CITES to revise Annotation 15 for the past three years. Global customs organizations, overburdened by the permitting requirements, also advocated for streamlining the rosewood rules. In the U.S. alone, the 2016 regulations swamped the Fish and Wildlife Service, as CITES permit requests more than tripled to 60,000 annually.
The CITES rosewood regulations were abruptly put into place in January 2017, taking the music industry by surprise and significantly slowing global trade in guitars, woodwinds, and various stringed instruments as manufacturers scrambled to develop compliance protocols. Larger producers including Fender, Gibson, Martin, and Taylor had the scale to manage the new permitting requirements, but still struggled. Frank Untermyer, supply chain director at Martin Guitars, said the administrative burden on his company "could not be overstated." Scott Paul, director of natural resource sustainability at Taylor Guitars, added that the rosewood regulation was hastily drafted and caused bureaucracies around the world to issue "an obscene amount of permits." Many smaller manufacturers and individual luthiers simply abandoned export markets.
The rosewood regulations were prompted by concerns of over-harvesting tropical hardwood forests, spurred by the surging demand for rosewood furniture in China. However, the CITES committee was unaware of the fact that their permitting regime placed serious burdens on instrument makers and performers. Paul indicated that CITES was receptive to the instrument makers' plea for relief "because we have a solid record of responsibly sourcing wood, and because we willingly supported permitting on unfinished wood." The fact that the music industry accounts for approximately one tenth of one percent of rosewood consumption also had some bearing.
The CITES vote in Geneva is an unalloyed victory for the music industry. All those who trade in guitars, stringed instruments, woodwinds, and even pianos (rosewood is often used in piano hammers) have been freed from a cumbersome administrative burden. However, Paul says the industry shouldn't get complacent. "It's likely that CITES may consider other important wood species," he says. "We need to remain engaged and vigilant."
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In this case, it's not stupid so much as an unfortunate accident. Kinda of like a bug getting squashed when you mow the lawn.
When drafting legislation like this, it's someones job to do intelligence gathering, which ironically is based on previous intelligence. It's probably the case that musical instrument sales are such a small part of the exotic wood industry that they have never even featured in the reports on the exotic wood market that was presented to the actual law makers.
In regulatory terms, a couple of years to square a full exemption is nothing, so this is realistically a big win/win.
Its not helped by the fact that most small industries don't have an eye on the big picture, why would they? That said, Scott Paul at Taylor has a great job and does a great job, and whilst typical horizon scanning might not have been enough to pick up, I'm surprised a) that they didn't and b) that either he or Untermyer at Martin werent' big enough to have CITES talk to them. There's "normally" at least some sort of consultation!
This is great news, and while I traveled with guitars across the Canadian border and in and out of Japan with zero problems ever, I worried about it at times when I would read about the CITES concerns. Now we can just get back to playing our instruments and quit having to worry so much about what they're made of.
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