Green Turtle Farm Seeks Registration as Captive Breeder

At Cayman Turtle Farm, green turtles live packed cheek-to-jowl. Peter Bennett and Ursula Keuper-Bennett/turtles.org

Bucking the international trend toward increasing protection for sea turtles and infuriating their own citizens, the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is petitioning CITES to register one Cayman Island turtle farm as an approved captive breeding facility for green turtles (Chelonia mydas), thus enabling legal export and international sale of green turtle shells, despite the green turtle's Appendix I listing under CITES. A similar proposal to CITES failed in 1985.

The Cayman Turtle Farm (CTF) started out in 1968 with 208 wild caught turtles and 500,000 eggs taken from five different countries of the Caribbean. From the beginning, the CTF was a commercial operation, producing turtle carapaces (dorsal shells), oil, meat, and cosmetics.

The business almost folded in 1978 when the U.S. banned the importation of all turtle products. But right up to the present, the farm has sold shells and trinkets to tourists, with helpful instructions from the staff on avoiding U.S. customs agents. Besides learning how to smuggle endangered species, the avid tourist can also, according to the farm's current web site, sample turtle soup and sandwiches in its snack bar.

In a recent dramatization of the grim reality of this park, one of our colleagues received a letter from a woman who just returned from a Carnival Cruise tour that visited the Cayman Turtle Farm. She wrote: "It is horrible! The cruise line led us to believe that it was an endangered species program which released the turtles back into the sea but it was definitely not that. They only release between 10-15% of those turtles according to our guide. The rest are processed for meat, shells, etc.  The conditions they are kept in are terrible, just big dirty tanks and the turtles are all trying to climb over each other to get out. It made me sick."