A Modest Proposal

Tropica, when you think about it, has truly followed in its Dutch heritage when it began exploring the world for rare aquatic plants thus opening up entire avenues scientifically, commercially and avocationally. The world continues to grow and benefit from their discoveries just like it did from the Dutch East India Company centuries ago. Apt parallels indeed! The United States probably has some of the most byzantine import laws especially as it relates to the importation of non native plants. Due to the carelessness of some hobbyists, some of those regulations are well deserved but others seem ridiculous and unscientific, though they may have had a good reason to exist long ago.

An excellent example is that imported plants must be shipped and transported with bare roots which makes mortality rates very high. This is to prevent any alien soil borne illnesses, which is understandable but these days we have inert, sanitary even sterile media like rock wool or the agar plate from clone cultures that the USDA and customs will not allow because that counts as soil . Even balling up the roots in sphagnum moss is disallowed and this is probably the most sanitary method because of its natural antibiotic properties.

Another ridiculous limitation, for individuals with an import license as opposed to a company, is that you can only bring in 12 specimens at a time and depending on how the customs agent is feeling that day, a pot full of the same species could count as a single specimen or he may count each individual stem as a single specimen and order the rest incinerated. Different strokes for different folks seems to exist in all levels of the various US departments and their concerns.

Successful, small scale importers exist. Why not a slightly larger scale one that fits in the same footprint but has more control over their supply lines while doing a lot of good for the world's people and yet still be able to indulge US hobbyists every whim with no impact or even an improvement on the environment?

Other import concerns have done exactly this so the model exists. Fair trade coffee comes immediately to mind. A more relevant example is Project Priaba which attempts to encourage native peoples of South America to sustainably farm and harvest ornamental fish while providing better quarantine protocols and thus preserve the environment while providing a living for the indigenous peoples.

I do not believe such a thing has been done for the aquarium plant trade. Tropica certainly doesn't do things like that and their nearest competitor Oriental Aquariums Nursery doesn't and wouldn't. You know many of the species we especially desire now are only available through them and they cannot sell to the US or in Oriental Aquarium's case, they can't sell much that is interesting to us.

Surely, between all the active members of TPT and APC someone would have connections to Borneo, Myanmar, Malaysia and the rest of Australasia while others could have connections to the areas around the Rio Negro, Xingú, Orinoco and the other far reaches of the Amazon as well as the biodiverse hotbeds of Madeira, Manaus, Porto Velho, Belém, Araguaia and Mato Grosso. Even if these connections to individuals were tenuous at best, the amenities of the Digital Age would make the effort trivial in searching for and reaching out to an agent or broker.

Surely, between all the active members of TPT and APC one of us is a trade and import lawyer and between all of us, capital can be generated to start a small import concern in a state with the least restrictive noxious weed laws. I believe you can see where I'm going with this.

But here is the twist. Of those connections, could not some of them set up the remote point of this hypothetical export concern where the local peoples are compensated to first responsibly collect , for example, starter specimens of Lagenandra, Bucephalandra and Cryptocoryne would begin as semi-wild starter plots of these plants whereupon a wise cultivation program of cloning, selective breeding and vegetative propagation on a hobbyist directed scale begin for the purpose of supplying Canada and the US with these rarer, more exotic plants? Given the severe economic depressions that many of these places have, this could only benefit the local peoples and the costs for such a venture would still be low.

Repeat these same steps in South America and Australasia and you suddenly have an exclusive global network of truly rare plant growers that under the umbrella of a US importer with all the proper import licenses and the special treatment that comes from being a legal corporate entity versus a single hobbyist and certain costs and restrictions begin to reduce down to something more convenient.

The locals own the plots and navigate the environment for the livestock. We lease those plots from them for what would still be a pittance though a boon to them, compensate them for their time on top of that and find clever ways to insure various aspects of the operations and you would have a lean organization of exclusive contractors united under this concern.

Reliable shipping and finding the boundaries of the importation laws would still be challenges but with the expense and thus risk spread out over enough individuals, it may become possible to take more unorthodox approaches or use more premium service providers and advisers.

Once livestock is safely within the US and the main distribution node, we replicate the cultivation efforts as a hedge against disaster for the remote sites such as blight, political instability, acts of God, theft, expropriation etc, etc as well as to hedge against unforeseen demand.

Some of the benefits of starting such an operation at this point in time are, as previously mentioned, the amenities of the Digital Age such as e-mail, cheap global telephone networks and better international mail as well as major disparities in currency against the US dollar.

The trailblazing has already been done by growers such as Tropica and the hot spots for plants already mapped out by various explorers and academicians. Further prospecting technology made even easier by satellite imaging of the planet which is quite easily available and the pervasive, reliable and easily accessible GPS networks. Surely I'm not the first to think of this?