World Status, Exploitation and Trade - WIDECAST

1INDONESIAjewellery. Most of the tortoiseshell trade occurs in Ujung Pandang, whenceit is exported (Anon., 1984c).International trade Indonesia acceded to CITES on 28 December 1978, andin spite of the fact that it hold no reservations for any species of seaturtle, has reported substantial quantities of exports since 1980. These areshown in Table 91. The Indonesian Annual Report to CITES is compiled byPHPA, and the quantities recorded appear to correlate relatively well withthe numbers of export permits issued for turtle products as reported byAnon. (1984c) and Schulz (1987). Information collected by Schulz (1987)makes it clear that, in 1985 at least, "shells" refers to leg of shells, and"bodies" refers to stuffed animals. During 1986, no exports permits wereissued for C. mydas . and only one permit was issued to export 1000 stuffedE. imbricata to Japan (Schulz, 1987). Various countries have reportedimports of small quantities of shells (mostly illegal or as personalpossessions) but these have been omitted from the table.Indonesian Customs statistics also record the export of "Tortoiseshell andwaste" and "Worked and art of tortoiseshell". These figures are shown inTables 93 and 95, and they appear to indicate a far greater level of tradethan has been officially covered by permits issued by PHPA. Some of the rawtortoiseshell may refer to shell of freshwater turtles, which are harvestedin Indonesia and exported to several oriental countries such as Hong Kong,Taiwan and probably also Singapore. However this possibility was notmentioned in Anon. (1984c) although the research had included a study of theoriginal export documents, and it would presumably have found some evidenceof freshwater turtles being involved in the trade. Anon. (1984c)investigated the discrepancy between the two sets of export figures, andconcluded that in some cases, exports of sea turtle products had taken placewithout being recorded in the statistics and without having had exportpermits issued by PHPA. In one case, it was possible to ascertain that thelocal PHPA office in Ujung Pandang had been in complicity with the exporterto issue an export permit contrary to the instructions of PHPA Headquartersin Bogor.The majority of turtle products are exported from Ujung Pandang, with mostof the remainder from Jakarta and Surabaya, on Java (Table 94). There issome confusion as to what the two different Customs categories refer to. Of12 739 kg of "Tortoiseshell and waste" (Category 0509200) exported fromUjung Pandang in February 1984, only 688 kg (5%) was raw tortoiseshell (i.e.scutes of E. imbricata ) , while the remainder comprised small, stuffedturtles. However, since 1978, Palembang has only exported turtle productsunder the category of "Worked and art of tortoiseshell" (Category 9505100),and this is known to include stuffed turtles (Anon., 1984c). It seemslikely that most, If not all, raw tortoiseshell scutes would be classifiedunder Category 0509200, but that stuffed turtles may fall under eithercategory, depending on the port of export.Even If the commodities exported under the different Customs categories canbe determined, It Is still more difficult to determine the quantities ofturtles Involved. A sample of 12 051 kg of stuffed turtles exported fromUjung Pandang had a mean weight of 1.8 kg per animal; and a shipment of100 kg of shell comprised 1376 "sheets", assumed to represent the scutesfrom 106 animals, and therefore giving a mean shell weight of 0.94 kg peranimal (Anon., 1984c). Analysis of the size of scutes received fromIndonesia by Japanese tortoiseshell dealers revealed that, from a total of4696 kg comprising scutes from 5957 turtles, the mean weight of scutes fromeach turtle was 788 g (Mllllken and Tokunaga, 1987).258