While most musicians respect CITES’ recent efforts to protect rosewood, these efforts will create an unreasonable burden on many small manufacturers and retailers of guitars, who do not have the legal resources to meet the recently expanded requirements.

CITES’ efforts will go a long ways in protecting the rosewood species from large furniture manufacturers and retailers, who often deal in mass quantities of rosewood, but the expansion of requirements is unreasonable and unfair for small manufacturers and retailers of guitars, who use a small fraction of the quantity of rosewood, and whose small businesses are threatened by this expansion of requirements.

This petition has been written to request a “usage exemption”, which provides an exemption for small manufacturers and retailers of guitars to use rosewood (CITES Appendix II items, not including Brazilian Rosewood) in their guitars, up to a specified amount in a calendar year, without being required to meet the expanded legal requirements that were implemented at the September 2016 CITES meeting in South Africa.