some of the world's most beautiful and important wild birds. In 

 order to explain why the Wild Bird Act is so important, I would 

 like to take a moment to describe the situation prior to the ap- 

 proval of this law by Congress and its enactment by President 

 Bush in 1992. 



Before then, the United States was the world's largest consumer 

 of wild exotic birds, importing somewhere between five and eight 

 hundred thousand birds per year in the 1980's. Unfortunately, the 

 majority of these birds were taken in the wild in unsustainable 

 harvest programs, having a seriously detrimental effect on the spe- 

 cies. In addition, for every bird imported experts estimated that up 

 to five more died in capture, holding and transport in their native 

 countries. And of the birds which finally did make it to the United 

 States, Department of Agriculture statistics show that from 1985 

 to 1990 over 330,000 birds were dead on arrival in their crates or 

 died during the required 30-day quarantine period. 



There is an international treaty, CITES, the Convention on 

 International Trade and Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and 

 Flora, which is designed to prevent unsustainable trade and mor- 

 tality in transport. But, at that time, CITES was not enough since 

 many of the nations involved in the wild bird trade lacked the abil- 

 ity or the incentive to collect the required information and institute 

 the controls that would be necessary to ensure that the trade was 

 not harmful to wild populations. That was the situation prior to 

 1992, and the United States was powerless to stop it until the Wild 

 Bird Conservation Act was enacted as a way to halt U.S. involve- 

 ment in this unsustainable trade. 



Before I describe how the Wild Bird Conservation Act has done 

 this, Mr. Chairman, I would like to describe some of the things 

 that the Wild Bird Conservation Act does not do. The Wild Bird 

 Conservation Act completely exempts all birds native to the United 

 States, like cardinals and bald eagles, from any of its provisions. 

 It also exempts ten families of birds, including game birds like 

 ducks, geese and turkeys as well as ostriches and others. It has no 

 effect at all on the commerce within any state or the commerce be- 

 tween states, nor does it have any effect on the breeding of birds 

 within the United States. The Wild Bird Act has focused on one 

 simple thing, regulating the imports of wild birds into the United 

 States to make sure that they originate from sustainably estab- 

 lished programs and do not suffer harm in transport. 



The Wild Bird Act accomplished this through a phase-in period, 

 and after one year a complete prohibition on imports of any bird 

 listed under CITES unless these birds met criteria for sustainable 

 origin. There are four ways in which the Wild Bird Act does this, 

 and I would like to describe very briefly each of those ways and 

 what we have done to date to implement that provision. 



The first step was to establish a permit process, since the law 

 provides that birds can come in with prior issuance of permits for 

 four purposes — personal pets, zoological display, scientific research, 

 and cooperative breeding programs. Since we finalized our regula- 

 tions for permits in 1993, we have issued over 550 permits, 90 per- 

 cent of them for personal pets. And we are now able to process per- 

 mit applications for these personal pets in less than two weeks. We 

 have also issued permits to 14 zoological institutions to import 



