Wildlife trafficking
The international wildlife trade is a serious conservation problem, addressed by the United Nations' Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora CITES, which currently has 175 member countries called Parties.
Legal wildlife trade
The legal wildlife trade includes specimens of species that are not listed in any of the three CITES Appendices, and specimens of species which are listed by CITES and which are traded internationally with the appropriate documents. These documents include permits and certificates for the import, export, re-export and introduction from the sea which are issued by the CITES Management Authorities of the respective countries. The UNEP–WCMC manages a trade database on behalf of the CITES Secretariat, where records of trade in wildlife and scientific names of taxa listed by CITES are reported annually.
It is important to note that wildlife trade that is legal is not necessarily sustainable. Hence, much legal trade in wildlife may still be a significant conservation concern. Unsustainable wildlife trade may be addressed in a number of ways, including listing a species of concern on the appropriate Appendix of CITES.
Illegal wildlife trade
Hunting for the illegal wildlife trade has the greatest potential to do maximum harm in minimal time, and is a serious threat to a number of endangered and vulnerable species. Illegal wildlife trade and contraband includes live pets, hunting trophies, fashion accessories, cultural artifacts, ingredients for traditional medicines, and wild meat for human consumption. Bushmeat trade is considered illegal when imports occur in contravention of the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), national quarantine laws, and other laws that ban the trade of specific animals.
Illegal wildlife trade is broadly defined as an environmental crime, which directly harms the environment. Wildlife trafficking is driven by organised groups who exploit natural resources and endanger threatened species and ecosystems in contravention of CITES. Environmental crimes by their very nature are trans-boundary, using porous borders, and involve cross-border criminal syndicates characterised by irregular migration, money laundering, corruption and the exploitation of disadvantaged communities.
The links between wealth, poverty and engagement in the wildlife trade are complex: people involved in the trade are not necessarily poor, and the poor who are involved do not capture the majority of the trade’s monetary value. In 2002, the illegal wildlife trade was estimated it to be the second largest illegal trade, second only to the drugs trade, with a value of at least £10 billion. In 2008, it was estimated that it is worth at least US$ 5 billion, and may potentially total in excess of $20 billion annually. This ranks the illegal wildlife trade as among the most lucrative illicit economies in the world, behind illegal drugs and possibly human trafficking and arms trafficking. Due to its clandestine nature, the illegal trade is difficult to quantify with any accuracy. Potential areas of market growth include the Internet, where traders use chat rooms and auction websites to engage in illicit wildlife sales.
Source: Wikipedia
The multi-billion dollar illegal trade in protected species is one of the most lucrative illicit markets in the world today. Combined with habitat loss, it is driving many wild animals and plants towards extinction. Unsustainable poaching and wildlife trafficking is perpetrated globally, with less developed countries often targeted in this theft. Controlled by organized international crime syndicates, the value of the illegal wildlife trade is estimated at US$10-20 billion annually by some experts.
Despite national and international laws designed to protect endangered species, almost all wild species are traded. Big cats, pangolins, reptiles, birds, elephant ivory and illegal timber are traded illegally in large quantities. This illegal trade is driven by demand for hardwoods and softwoods; rare plants; bones, scales and other ingredients for traditional medicines; pets and zoo exhibits; collectors’ trophies; decorations and luxury items; as well as wild meat and other products. Many of those involved in the trade, including consumers, are unaware of the impact their actions.
With species being removed from the wild faster than they can repopulate, their inputs to critical natural processes and ecosystem resilience are lost - a 'knock on' effect that causes other species to disappear. Left unchecked, wildlife trafficking threatens to unravel entire ecosystems.
Wildlife Trafficking Impacts:
- Massive and irrevocable biodiversity loss: If trends continue, scientists predict 13-42% of Southeast Asia’s animal and plant species could be wiped out this century. At least half those losses would represent global extinctions.
- Unravelling of living ecosystems that underpin essential environmental services including fresh water supply, food production, and climate stability.
- Human health is endangered by unregulated trade in wild animals that can spread and pass on viruses and diseases. SARS and Avian Influenza, for example, were transferred from wild animals to human beings.
- Organized Crime is strengthened by profits from illegal wildlife trade. Links are now being detected between wildlife crime, drug trafficking and human trafficking.
Source: www.freeland.org
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Vietnam ranked 'worst country'
in new WWF-Report on animal protection
July 22, 2012 - HANOI, Vietnam (AP)
A conservation group ranked Vietnam the worst country for wildlife crime Monday in its first-ever report on how well 23 Asian and African countries protect rhinos, tigers and elephants.
WWF said Vietnam's tiger farms and its citizens' voracious appetite for rhino horn as a supposed cure-all helped put it at the top of the list. Neighboring China, widely viewed as the world's largest market for illegal wildlife products, finished a close second, and Laos was third.
The Switzerland-based WWF focused its report on countries where the threatened animals live in the wild or are traded or consumed.
Many consumers in Asia demand illegal wildlife products for their purported, if unproven, medicinal properties. The Washington D.C.-based Brookings Institution has said the illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion per year in Southeast Asia alone.
The WWF report said Vietnam is "the major destination" for rhino horns trafficked from South Africa, where 448 rhinos were poached last year. Rhino horn can fetch the U.S. street value of cocaine in Asia, where it is crushed and consumed by people who believe — wrongly, doctors say — that it can cure diseases.
It also said Vietnam's 2007 decision to legalize tiger farms on a pilot basis has "undermined" the country's efforts to police illegal trade in tiger products. Vietnam has 11 registered tiger farms.
A conservation group ranked Vietnam the worst country for wildlife crime Monday in its first-ever report on how well 23 Asian and African countries protect rhinos, tigers and elephants.
WWF said Vietnam's tiger farms and its citizens' voracious appetite for rhino horn as a supposed cure-all helped put it at the top of the list. Neighboring China, widely viewed as the world's largest market for illegal wildlife products, finished a close second, and Laos was third.
The Switzerland-based WWF focused its report on countries where the threatened animals live in the wild or are traded or consumed.
Many consumers in Asia demand illegal wildlife products for their purported, if unproven, medicinal properties. The Washington D.C.-based Brookings Institution has said the illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated $8 billion to $10 billion per year in Southeast Asia alone.
The WWF report said Vietnam is "the major destination" for rhino horns trafficked from South Africa, where 448 rhinos were poached last year. Rhino horn can fetch the U.S. street value of cocaine in Asia, where it is crushed and consumed by people who believe — wrongly, doctors say — that it can cure diseases.
It also said Vietnam's 2007 decision to legalize tiger farms on a pilot basis has "undermined" the country's efforts to police illegal trade in tiger products. Vietnam has 11 registered tiger farms.
The 35-page report comes on the heels of a controversy that erupted in May, when international wildlife experts learned that Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development had in March proposed allowing parts of tigers that die in captivity to be made into traditional medicine on a pilot basis.
Wildlife advocacy groups later said the proposal was designed to effectively legalize trade in tiger products — an accusation Vietnam denied. An official at Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung's office told the Associated Press earlier this month that Dung had rejected the proposal.
In this photo taken on July 4, 2012, a tiger lies in a concrete shelter at a tiger farm in southern Binh Duong province, Vietnam. The Switzerland-based conservation group WWF said in a report Monday, July 23, 2012 that Vietnam
For more pictures, please see the original article published at Huffington Post
For more pictures, please see the original article published at Huffington Post
Asia's wildlife trade
Insatiable demand for traditional medicines, exotic pets, and culinary delicacies drives a multibillion-dollar business - legal and illegal - that is emptying forests, fields, and seas.
Bagged turtles at the Qingping market in Guangzhou, China, are destined for the dinner table. These include red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans), a species originally from the Mississippi River Basin in the U.S. that is now raised commercially here. Stoked by the growing national economy, consumer demand has almost completely wiped out China's native turtles, and the trade is turning to sources abroad. Shops at this market sell turtles from Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Photograph by Mark Leong
Tourists feed tigers at a private zoo in Guilin, China. Owners of such animals are pushing to legalize sales of captive-tiger products. Conservationists fear that any form of legal tiger trade would further endanger the few cats that still roam free.
Photograph by Mark Leong
At a breeding facility in Indonesia, baby green tree pythons (Morelia viridis) cling to perches that substitute for branches in their native tropical forests. Seen here at about eight inches long, each snake will grow to several feet and will likely turn a shade of green—though a few retain their yellow hue or even change dramatically to colors such as sky blue. For snake collectors around the world, captive-bred animals offer a sustainable alternative to those taken from the wild.
For more pictures, please go to the original post at National Geographic
New TRAFFIC-study reveals scale of persistent illegal Tiger trade
Photo courtesy Mekong Waterfront Guard & Natural Resources and Environmental Crime Suppression Division (NRECD) Thailand. Picture via National Geographic
Bangkok, Thailand, 7th March 2013—Parts of more than 1400 Tigers have been seized across Asia in the past 13 years, according to TRAFFIC’s latest analysis of confiscations, which includes new data for 2010-2012.
Reduced to Skin and Bones Revisited (see next PDF-document on this page) finds that parts of at least 1425 Tigers had been seized across all but one of the 13 Tiger range countries between 2000 and 2012. For Cambodia alone, no seizures were recorded at all during the period.
Although it is not yet possible to show a definite trend, the analysis provides clear evidence that illegal trade in Tigers, their parts and products, persists as a major conservation concern, says TRAFFIC.
A total of 654 seizures of Tiger parts ranging from skin to bones, to teeth, claws and skulls took place during this period, an average of 110 Tigers killed for trade per year or just over two per week.
89% of seizures occur outside protected areas, emphasizing the importance of anti-trafficking actions to disrupt trade chains and prevent incursions into Tiger habitat. The benefits of such analysis to enhance law enforcement efforts to protect Tigers are obvious.
“If more robust information was routinely collected, analysed and shared between countries, real inroads could be made into targeting the smuggling syndicates behind Tiger trafficking,” said Natalia Pervushina, Tiger Trade Programme Leader for TRAFFIC and WWF.
The report, a joint effort by TRAFFIC and the WWF Tigers Alive Initiative, was launched today at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) meeting currently underway in Bangkok, Thailand. Later this week governments will debate efforts underway to protect Tigers and other Asian big cats.
A significant finding in the updated analysis was increased recording of seizures involving live Tigers – 61 individuals were seized in the three-year period since the last full CITES meeting took place in 2010, representing 50% of overall numbers (123) recorded since 2000. Thailand was the most significant location for interdiction of live Tiger trade (30 Tigers), followed by Lao PDR (11) and Indonesia (9) and Viet Nam (4).
“Given the low population estimates for wild tigers in Thailand, Lao PDR and Viet Nam, combined with the presence of captive Tiger facilities within these three countries, there are serious questions as to the source of these live Tigers in trade,” said Nick Cox, Species Programme Manager for WWF-Greater Mekong.
Of the 13 Tiger range countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand, Viet Nam), only India had kept sufficiently detailed seizure records to allow meaningful analysis to identify the ‘hotspots’ where Tiger trade was taking place.
Based on the information from India, five ‘hotspot’ locations were identified, including Delhi, while the other four were close to protected areas in different parts of the country (Uttar Pradesh, central India, West Bengal (Sundarbans) and the southern India landscape of the Western Ghats).
“The quality of the information from India allowed us to perform a spatial analysis and pinpoint the key locations where Tiger trade is taking place,” said Sarah Stoner, TRAFFIC’s Tiger Trade Data Specialist and author of the report. “Countries should be made to keep to their commitments under CITES to protect wild Tigers by providing robust reporting on the current situation.”
Under agreements made at earlier CITES meetings, Tiger range countries have to state what action they have taken to protect Asian big cats. As of the start of the CITES meeting currently underway in Bangkok, only China, India and Thailand had submitted appropriate reports in compliance with a CITES requirement to do so.2
WWF and TRAFFIC are urging countries engaged in the Global Tiger Recovery Program to develop a harmonized process for reporting to the GTRP that will also fulfil the requirements of CITES with respect to Tigers.
World Bank urges action against tiger poaching
March 11, 2013 - The World Bank is pressing Thailand to tighten its control over illegal poaching and trading in wildlife after finding that the country is a hub of the illicit tiger trade.
"We will ask the Thai prime minister and her government to take serious action against tiger poachers as she seemed interested in this subject, and with her leadership this could be achieved," Keshav Varma, director of the World Bank's Global Tiger Initiative, said yesterday.
A recent study by Traffic and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) showed that Thailand was the most significant location for the interdiction of the live tiger trade, followed by Laos, Indonesia and Vietnam.
"Given the low population estimates for wild tigers in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam combined with the presence of captive tiger facilities within these three countries, there are serious questions as to the source of these live tigers in trade," said Nick Cox, species programme manager for WWF Greater Mekong.
From 2000-12, 1,425 tiger parts were seized across 13 tiger range countries. A total of 654 seizures of body parts ranging from skin and bones to teeth, claws and skulls took place during this period. About 110 tigers were killed on average for trade per year or just over two per week. About 89 per cent of the seizures occurred outside protected areas.
Source
"We will ask the Thai prime minister and her government to take serious action against tiger poachers as she seemed interested in this subject, and with her leadership this could be achieved," Keshav Varma, director of the World Bank's Global Tiger Initiative, said yesterday.
A recent study by Traffic and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) showed that Thailand was the most significant location for the interdiction of the live tiger trade, followed by Laos, Indonesia and Vietnam.
"Given the low population estimates for wild tigers in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam combined with the presence of captive tiger facilities within these three countries, there are serious questions as to the source of these live tigers in trade," said Nick Cox, species programme manager for WWF Greater Mekong.
From 2000-12, 1,425 tiger parts were seized across 13 tiger range countries. A total of 654 seizures of body parts ranging from skin and bones to teeth, claws and skulls took place during this period. About 110 tigers were killed on average for trade per year or just over two per week. About 89 per cent of the seizures occurred outside protected areas.
Source
