Michael Ivie recently wrote: "Would you mind providing TAXACOM with an explaination of how it came to be that a collecting permit costs foreigners (I have always assumed it applies to all non-Mexicans?) an amount that exceeds the average monthly salary of a Mexican worker? Since you are familiar with the situation, perhaps you can take a situation of much resentment and animosity and turn it into a logical, non-threatening piece of information"

Here follows my explanation, based on my own experience and some talks to informed persons. 1) The regulation we are referring to (permit requirements for scientific collecting in Mexico) was issued at a time when the responsible gvt. officer was not a biologist and which was overjealous in performing the tasks of protecting mexican biota. 2) At that time, about two or three cases came to the attention of the authorities of commercial exporting of fauna disguised as scientific collecting. Notorious were an american Ph.D. student that supported his field costs by selling mexican fauna, and a professional american researcher that also exported specimens to sell (I know the names and affiliations of the above, but I do not think it will be useful to the purpose of this discussion to name them). There were also european cases and also several more openly commercial examples. 3) The hundreds of bona fide cases of scientific collecting simply were either not known or ignored by that government officer, which I would like to stress, was almost totally ignorant of common ecological and taxonomic field research practices. 4)The regulation was thus concieved as a way of both protecting the biota and getting some part of what it was regarded as mainly for-profit activities. 5) Soon after the legislation began to be enforced (and we Mexicans also have to put up with a lot of the red tape, although we are dispensed from payment), the research institutions and the Mexican government started getting a lot of complaints from foreign researchers. When, three years ago, the gvt. officer responsible for the regulation was replaced by a professional ecologist, he began a process to propose a proper law (not a mere administrative regulation) of access to genetic resources. This was too ambitious, but the process he started will at least end in an official Mexican Norm for Scientific Collections, which has involved a lot of consultation with local experts and also the input from many, mainly american, foreign scientists and which is based on the assumption that most scientific collecting in Mexico benefits the country, rather than on the "guilty until proven otherwise" previous regulation.

In short, the current procedure is the overeaction of a non-professional which was legitimately concerned by the illicit activities of a few foreign academic free riders. Alas, I could not find why the precise amount $700.00.

I hope this may be interesting to some of you netters.

Also, I have been requesting all the different regulations for the export of specimens (different from the collecting...), transport of living animals, etc. and soon I will have a very complete file of mexican red tape useful to foreign taxonomist interested in collecting in Mexico. It will be in Spanish but you shouldtTake this as encouragement to learn what I would like to propose as the official language of biodiversity (!).

Regards to all.