Despite the requests and the recommendations from the scientists, the categorization was never made official. So what happened?

Commercial pressure

Rodolfo Vásquez, an investigator and scientific forestry coordinator for the completed study, has a theory: “The opinion of the timber companies is more important than that of the scientists. They put up opposition in the public consultation [before the project was approved]. And ultimately, Serfor undervalued the work that was done,” he says.

At the end of 2016, the weekly publication Hildebrandt en Sus Trece published a report detailing observations in reaction to the document produced by the working group. This report was written by Elialdo Motta, the monitoring manager of Bozovich Timber Products, a subsidiary of one of the country’s most important timber consortiums, the Bozovich Group. The businessman maintained that there were no quantitative studies to support the inclusion of the shihuahuaco to the category of threatened species.

Asked about the issue, Wilfredo Mendoza, a scientist and coordinator for the study, told the website Ojo-Publico.com (“Public Eye”) that this new category for the shihuahuaco would allow “business to be more controlled.” He said that during discussions of the working group, the categorization of shihuahuaco was the most contentious because it was one of the most traded.

Faced with the insistent request from the group of scientists, Serfor responded with a letter, sent in January 2017. In the letter, it was suggested that various holes in the information had been detected during the categorization process, meaning Serfor was unable to support the classification of some species. The letter, signed by Walter Nalvarte, from the Administration of Sustainable Management for the Development of Wild Forest and Fauna, said the study had not carried out an analysis on the population of shihuahuaco, when this evaluation should have been carried out by Serfor.

The group members said the study systemized and analyzed information from the last 20 years, comparing this to data from the Agriculture Ministry’s official forestry records. Serfor did not respond further, and the scientists’ study recommending the inclusion of shihuahuaco to the list of threatened species was left forgotten.

From the Amazon to foreign shores

Serfor maintains that the re-categorization of species in danger is still in the works. It is “processing the contributions from the scientific community and additional information together with the first results from the national inventories,” it said in a response to Ojo-Publico.com. However, the inventory corresponding to the regions in which the shihuahuaco is located — Loreto, Ucayali and Madre de Dios — amounts to just 9 percent of the total sample.

In this context, an update of the new species being impacted by high demand in the international market seems to be some way off.