Is this legal or not.
 

Hi, I found this video on YouTube .
Find rare forest orchids in Vietnam - YouTube
Is this right or not. The orchids seem to be collected from their wild habitat :yikes:
I DON'T UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE THEY SPEAK!

Whether the collection of wild orchids is illegal or not is a matter of Vietnamese law (I don't know).

Internationally trading them would be illegal under CITES.

Even if it were legal to collect wild orchids in Vietnam (and I bet it isn't), it's certainly illegal to bring them back to the USA, or across any international border. If got caught, there would definitely be trouble.

Thank you, pretty sure it's illegal there too. Anyway I have another question .

What would you do if you saw wild collected orchids for sale in the local flower market. Would you buy it and grow it properly at home or just not buy from the seller again.

I think the problem to why there is a demand in collecting wild orchids and selling them is because these orchids are not large scale cultivated in a nursery. Mostly the orchids you see at a store are hybrids and it's the same thing every day. If the native wild orchids are cultivated in a big nursery( I don't know if it is allowed ) the demand would decrease: preserving native wild orchids.

That's exactly the problem. People need to be mass producing these rare wild orchids. But you should never buy a plant you suspect was collected from the wild. That only encourages the poacher to keep poaching more plants, and eventually these plants will be extinct in the wild.

"Extinct in the wild" is a misuse of the word "extinct,". Extinction is an absolute, like pregnancy. You are or you aren't extinct or pregnant, irrespective of geography. The proper word is "extirpated".

Thank you for clearing that up. I said "extinct in the wild" because that is a common turn of phrase which people use, because it's easy to understand, where not everybody may know what "extirpated" means. But now a few more people do, so thank you for that.

Having lived in Việt Nam in recent years, I can say whether it is legal or not has no bearing on the activity. If it makes money, and they can navigate the system, it’s all good. I’m sure there are plenty of people in VN that would reject collecting wild orchids. But relatively few would consider it as an issue. Anywhere in the world there are poor people, plants of value will get harvested. People have done it incessantly in Appalachia where I live. I will say they don’t look particularly poor though! But one never knows. One of my best friends just installed a floor and indoor kitchen for her family in the Mekong Delta.

So Russell they’re speaking Viet, which I do pretty well with in Saigon (HCMC), but highlands dialect is hard for native speakers. I can’t understand them either. It is by far one of the hardest languages to learn, and frustrating to travel to other areas like Hanoi where you’re constantly corrected, or central highlands where you can’t really understand anything. But overall it is an incredible country, love the people. Well move back there one day.

Collecting orchids is illegal if the species is listed in the Red Book. And so it's legal

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists several categories of population threat to species. This graphic is from their Web site at IUCN Red List of Threatened Species | IUCN

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Extinct in the Wild is one of these. It means there are no individuals left in any wild populations. Extinct means there are no individuals left.

An example of Extinct in the Wild would be many species of the Africa cycad genus Encephalartos. More than half the named species have been removed by poachers to the point there are none left in habitat. Almost every year brings news yet another Encephalartos species is extinct in the wild. They exists in gardens somewhere, if they survive transplanting.