WILDLIFE CRIME/TRADE/BREEDING

[Lisbeth]

THE OFTEN OVERLOOKED IVORY TRADE:

BY SADÉ MONERON ELEANOR DRINKWATER - APRIL 2021 - TRAFFIC

A rapid assessment of the international trade in Hippo ivory between 2009 and 2018.

Following several developments— including an auction of hippo teeth and a proposed cull of hippos in Tanzania, the cancellation and reinstatement of a hippo cull in Zambia, and a call for evidence on hippo ivory trade by the United Kingdom — there has been increased interest in this often-overlooked ivory trade.

Click on the title in order to read the whole report.

[Richprins]

Hippo teeth are sold as fake ivory, yes. I wonder if there is much difference?

[Lisbeth]

Probably not! And who cares about a hippo

[Lisbeth]

Set him free: Barbara Creecy’s high-level panel wants to ban the captive- lion breeding industry. Photo: Naashon Zalk/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Wildlife farming vs Creecy’s panel

BY SHEREE BEGA - 14TH MAY 2021 - MAIL AND GUARDIAN

Allowing the manipulation of the genes of indigenous wildlife species through their listing as domesticated wildlife under the Animal Improvement Act will erode the genetic integrity of South Africa’s wildlife heritage, says the SA Hunters and Game Conservation Association.

It started legal proceedings against the department of agriculture, land reform and rural development in December 2019 in the high court over the listing of wildlife in the Act, which promotes the intensive and selective breeding and cross-breeding of animals. The new list features 38 indigenous wildlife species, including lions, cheetahs, rhinos and threatened species such as bontebok, blue duiker, roan antelope and oribi, together with livestock.

In a recent paper in the South African Journal of Science on the “implications of the reclassification of South African wildlife species as farm animals” under the Act, several wildlife experts warned that the law will not improve the genetics of the species but will have negative genetic consequences and pose ecological and economic risks.

“Domesticated varieties of wildlife will represent a novel, genetic pollution threat to South Africa’s indigenous wildlife that will be virtually impossible to prevent or reverse,” they stated.

Last week, a high-level panel report on how South Africa deals with its wildlife highlighted the “misalignment” and problems caused by overlapping mandates of the department of environment and the department of agriculture.

On 2 May, the minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment, Barbara Creecy, released the panel’s report, which recommended ending the captive lion industry and phasing out rhino captive breeding operations.

Lizanne Nel, the conservation manager for SA Hunters, argues that Creecy is urging valuing wild populations. At the same time, the agriculture department has listed indigenous wildlife species under the Act, which allows for the domestication of wildlife through agricultural production.

“Wildlife should be wild and valued as such,” said Nel.

The Endangered Wildlife Trust has also launched an application in the high court, challenging and seeking the review of the decision to list wild animals in the Act.

‘Genetic integrity eroded’

Nel said the amendment was done without consulting the wildlife sector and considering the “potentially harmful impacts on the species in question, the eco-tourism and authentic hunting sector and the country’s broader wildlife economy”.

“By allowing manipulation of the genes of our indigenous wildlife species through the listing of these species in terms of the Animal Improvement Act, the genetic integrity of our wildlife heritage will be eroded and the administrative burden to attempt to keep manipulated populations, and those that are pure separate will increase conservation costs to both government and the private sector.”

She said that despite legal instruments forbidding gene mixing between various subspecies, it does occur. “Recent examples include the mixing of bontebok and blesbok, blue wildebeest with black wildebeest and West African roan with Eastern and Southern roan populations, even though biodiversity regulations do not allow this.”

‘Superior animals’

The agriculture department did not respond to a request for comment from the Mail & Guardian. But in an answering affidavit on 7 April to the legal action brought by SA Hunters, Joel Mamabolo, the director of animal production at the the agriculture department, said the objective of the Act is to provide for the breeding, identification and use of genetically superior animals to improve the production and performance of animals in the interest of the country.

The amendment related to farmed game animals. Game farmers, he said, who wish to reproduce or embark on specific animal genetic improvement will have to get permission. There was no control over the animal improvement industry as far as game animals are concerned, or over the registration of donor animals “which can and has led to inbreeding problems” in captive breeding programmes, including serious genetic defects, and over the collection and sale of the genetic material of game animals, he said.

Declaring game species as animals for the Act “will promote food production, control over inbreeding, cross-breeding and sustainable utilisation, conservation and preservation of the gene pool. Consequently, protect the genetic integrity of the listed animals.”

Meat Safety Act

In February last year, the agriculture department proposed expanding the 35 domesticated animals and wild game species, the commercial slaughter of which is regulated under the Meat Safety Act, to a new list of more than 90 non-indigenous and local species, including rhinos, hippos, giraffes and elephants, that may be slaughtered as food for human and animal consumption.

Ashleigh Dore, the wildlife and law project manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, said the amendment to the Meat Safety Act as read with the proposed regulations on game meat — if and when they are promulgated — aims to facilitate and regulate the processing of meat from game animals that have been hunted or culled.

She said the Endangered Wildlife Trust does not support the increasing tendency for industrial-scale production and management of South African wildlife “when these are not in line with the principles of ecologically sustainable use and have no conservation benefit. Therefore, while we wholly support the move to create a legal framework to support the commercial sale of game meat from wild animals from natural free-living conditions, we do not support the intensive and selective breeding of wild animals for commercial meat production.”

Melissa Lewis, the policy and advocacy programme manager at BirdLife South Africa, said even if the Meat Safety Act is amended to include additional wild species, this doesn’t necessarily imply these animals will be domesticated for meat because this is also a statute that is intended to be used to regulate the safety of meat from hunted game.

“The mistrust in government’s intentions, however, stems from the coupling of these proposed amendments with those of the Animal Improvement Act.”

Original article: https://mg.co.za/environment/2021-05-14 ... ssion=true

[Lisbeth]

Unregulated by U.S. at home, Facebook boosts wildlife trafficking abroad

by Ian Morse on 8 June 2021



- The world’s largest social media company, Facebook, regularly connects wildlife traffickers around the world, and advocates are stepping up the pressure to address the problem in the company’s home country.
- Proposed U.S. legislation targets a decades-old law that protects online companies’ content as free speech on their platform. Advocates say wildlife crime is not speech, and that online companies lack the regulation that other “real-life” companies must follow.
- Trafficking has increased since Facebook chose to self-regulate in 2019, researchers say. The company could cooperate with law enforcement or conservationists, but it has rarely chosen to do so.
- Meanwhile, researchers are gathering more and more evidence that wildlife trafficking is one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity.

Click on the title to read the whole article!

[RogerFraser]

https://www.eventbrite.sg/e/wwf-explain ... eventbrite

Date and time
Wed, 23 June 2021

13:00 – 14:30 SAST

Location
Online event



WWF Explains is a virtual engagement series bringing together experts and people together for a conversation on all things conservation.
About this event
Has the advancement of technology made it even more challenging today to conserve wildlife and end illegal wildlife trade (IWT)?

Speaking on this topic, we are joined by:

Dr Adrian Loo from NParks - to explain how Singapore is playing its part to combat IWT through successful seizures and strict regulations, and its response against online IWT in Singapore

Serene Chng from TRAFFIC - to highlight the efforts and challenges with wildlife conservation from IWT and the challenges of halting online IWT regionally

Sami Kizilbash from Google - to discuss the complexity of overcoming IWT online and the roles technology and digital innovation play in deterrence and detection

Stay tuned till the end of the webinar to find out how you can join us as Cyber Spotters to help us in our mission to end IWT online!

[Lisbeth]

Japan must finally end the sale and trade of elephant ivory

BY JAMES A. BAKER III AND HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON - 26TH JULY 2021 - WASHINGTON POST
James A. Baker III was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.

As the world watches the Tokyo Olympics, our thoughts turn to the international peace and cooperation that the Games have come to symbolize. Each of us, in the administrations we served, wedded these traditional concerns of state to the conservation of nature — and of wildlife species in particular. The growth of wildlife trafficking by sophisticated criminal syndicates has heightened our conviction that the world must speak with one voice.

With that in mind, we believe Tokyo has now a singular opportunity to finally eliminate the sale and trade of elephant ivory in Japan while improving its reputation as a global leader and financial capital.

Market demand for ivory products is the main driver for elephant poaching. Now that the United States, Britain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have closed their domestic markets for elephant ivory, Japan has become the world’s largest remaining legal domestic ivory market.

Market demand for ivory products is the main driver for elephant poaching. Now that the United States, Britain, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have closed their domestic markets for elephant ivory, Japan has become the world’s largest remaining legal domestic ivory market.

Significant loopholes in Japan’s federal regulatory system continue to allow illegal ivory to enter the country. For example, reliable proof of legal origin and acquisition has never been a requirement, even though it is an obligation under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Likewise, cut pieces of tusks used to make small items of worked ivory are exempt from Japanese registration requirements, making it impossible to identify and track individual pieces, because marking them is not required.

Substantial evidence indicates that these loopholes, combined with weak monitoring and enforcement, have made Japan a key destination for and source of transnational ivory trafficking. As a result, other countries’ bans on domestic ivory trade are undermined — particularly valiant efforts by African countries to protect elephants in their territories.

Between January 2018 and December 2020, at least 76 seizures of ivory routed through Japan were made in other countries, including 72 occurring in China. A recent study of Chinese travelers to Japan found that 19 percentplanned to purchase ivory and an estimated 12 percent actually did make an ivory purchase, with the majority bringing that ivory home to China by plane or through the mail, which constitutes smuggling under Chinese law.

The preference of Japanese dealers for the hard ivory of forest elephant tusks is particularly worrisome. Africa’s forest elephants — a critically endangered species native to the humid forests of West Africa — have been devastated by trade. Almost 2 of every 3 African forest elephants were eliminated between 2002 and 2011 according to a census led by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

This is a matter of personal interest to us both. James Baker carried on a decades-long commitment to conservation by Republican administrations as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. Responding to rampant elephant poaching, the Bush administration joined the diplomatic and conservation communities in 1989 to call for a total ban on ivory trade. The United States paved the way for this historic agreement through a unilateral ban on ivory imports, as well as its strong support for including the species on Appendix I of CITES.

Hillary Clinton has vivid memories of seeing African elephants in the wild during her travels with President Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, only a few years later. As secretary of state, she assisted President Barack Obama on the issuance of a National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking and the establishment of the U.S. Task Force and Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking. Out of government, she launched a partnership to save elephants through the Clinton Global Initiative.

As Tokyo vies to attract foreign investment and position itself as a regional financial hub, the city’s leaders must take seriously the risks that the domestic ivory trade creates for these firms and banks. The Financial Task Force of the Royal Foundation, led by Britain’s Prince William, has received pledges from leading global financial institutions to uncover the laundering of profits derived from the illegal wildlife trade. They are seeking partnership from governments to impede these activities, which in many cases are used to finance drug trafficking, terrorism, and other domestic and international transnational crimes and security threats.

We applaud Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, for establishing an Advisory Committee on the Regulation of Ivory Trade in January 2020. That was an important first step. With international focus on the Olympics, this is a moment when decisive action can have a significant and positive impact on the conservation and protection of elephants as well as on national and international security. Japan must act now to preserve its reputation as a global leader.

Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ames-baker

[Lisbeth]

Banking on sustainability: South African lenders launch task force to crack down on illicit cash flows from wildlife trafficking

Opinionista • Tanya dos Santos • 20 September 2021

Wildlife crime has traditionally been a cash economy, but as international syndicates move in, money laundering through banks takes over. South African banks have launched the SA Anti-Money Laundering Integrated Task Force to ensure a consolidated approach to the detection of wildlife trafficking.

The world is slowly coming to grips with its interconnectedness. Crises, such as the global financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, have shown us just how integrated we have become as a society, linking the systems that govern the world and highlighting the need for a collaborative effort across government, business and civil society to protect against future crises. Through this, the focus on sustainability has risen in prominence, but it seems, ironically, the interconnectedness of the sustainability goals is not fully appreciated.

Bold statements like “wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years” seem to have done little to elevate the importance or urgency of environmental crimes. Have we become desensitised to these emotive statements or are we merely oblivious to the reality that the health and abundance of our natural world are critical to our survival?

In the past two decades, the world has witnessed an alarming increase in poaching and illegal trade in a variety of protected wildlife species. This is addressed in Target 15.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It calls for urgent action to end poaching and trafficking of protected species of flora and fauna and to address both demand and supply of illegal wildlife products – but as with all the SDGs, it cannot be viewed in isolation, either as a risk or in its mitigation. The impact of these wildlife crimes is not limited to biodiversity loss or environmental degradation, they also undermine the rule of law, and affect economic growth and the livelihoods of the communities that depend on a flourishing ecosystem of flora and fauna.

So, where does the financial system come in? Wildlife crimes are extremely lucrative, creating significant income for criminal networks who span the globe, from developing countries where wildlife may flourish, to more developed countries where demand proliferates. These illicit profits are flushed or laundered into the legal system through various methods, all aiming to conceal their criminal origin. We keep hearing that to disrupt the criminal networks we need to “follow the money”, but this is easier said than done.

Financial flows associated with wildlife trafficking have traditionally depended on cash transactions in source countries, where poachers at the bottom of the trade chain receive smaller disbursements, which multiply as you go up the ladder. But with the advent of the “cashless” economy, we now see these payments being made through mobile money transfers, iTunes vouchers and even cryptocurrencies. This is making it increasingly difficult to follow the distribution of money.

While financial flows at the source are mostly cash-based, further up the supply chain international wildlife crime syndicates rely on the global banking system to move funds.

Technological advancements have been made on both sides, however, and the use of financial and anti-money laundering investigative practices can substantially assist wildlife crime investigations. They help to identify associated members of the criminal network, determine the derived profits and potentially allow seizure and confiscation of the related assets, while providing additional evidence to support the predicate offence – a crime that is a component of a larger crime.

This is where the banking system has an important role to play. Banks have skills and resources to detect “dirty money” associated with wildlife crimes and report any suspicious activity to law enforcement agencies which can take the necessary steps to break the chain.

Law enforcement is another tricky area. Local legislation recognises wildlife crime as a predicate offence to money laundering. But due to the complexities in investigating financial crimes like money laundering, these elements are often not explored by law enforcement authorities and therefore never prosecuted alongside the actual wildlife crime. This means that wildlife crime is considered as an underlying criminal activity which results in laundered assets.

The problem is bigger than most perceive, as is so often the case with sustainability issues. Different countries can have different classifications as to what is regarded as a wildlife crime, which means it may not be seen as a predicate offence. We therefore need governments to urgently implement adequate and aligned international legislation for the application of anti-money laundering practices to be effective across borders.

However, we are encouraged by the increasing global collaboration taking place to tackle these issues. The Financial Action Task Force is an intergovernmental body created to set international standards for combating money laundering and provides guidelines to countries on how to go after the money involved in the illegal wildlife trade, and to identify and dislocate large criminal networks who are the beneficiaries.

Another example is the Royal Foundation’s work through the establishment of United for Wildlife, which now has more than 200 members and more than 50 partners connected across the world. Together they have supported more than 150 law enforcement investigations, facilitated the search of more than 120 suspicious shipments, enabled 49 arrests and trained more than 80,000 industry employees in countering illegal wildlife trade practices.

South African banks have taken it one step further and developed a working group under the guidance of Samlit, the South African Anti-Money Laundering Integrated Task Force, to ensure a consolidated approach to wildlife trafficking. Samlit is a financial information-sharing partnership involving the public and private sectors that highlights the efficacy of collaboration. The partnership is relatively new but is geared towards ensuring that knowledge of the modus operandi of financial criminals is shared, that institutions increase their understanding of financial crime types and that the work of Samlit helps law enforcement authorities in their follow-through.

We are already seeing signs of success as organised criminals are put under immense pressure with the joint, multidisciplinary intelligence operations leading to more and more arrests in the country, with valuable help from the private sector.

The increasing innovation around online payments and the cashless environment makes a coordinated response from public and private sectors and NGOs crucial to outsmart the criminals and disrupt the financial flows related to illegal wildlife trade.

There is, however, still a long road ahead. Achieving SDG 15.7 and all that it represents will depend on genuine political and legislative commitments, private sector participation and bank collaboration to ensure we secure wildlife sustainability. DM

Tanya dos Santos is the Global Head of Sustainability for Investec Group and Head of Investec Rhino Lifeline. She sits on the board of the United Nations Global Compact local network in South Africa and represents Investec on the United Nations Global Investors for Sustainable Development working groups.

[Richprins]

[Lisbeth]

How tourism fuels Southeast Asia’s wildlife trade

BY SORAYA KISHTWARI - 28TH SEPTEMBER 2021 - CHINADIALOGUE.NET

Tour operators and guides encourage visitors to buy illegal ivory, tiger ‘glue’ and other products

Tourist guides and information centres in Southeast Asia have been fuelling the illegal wildlife trade by facilitating consumption by tourists, several investigations show.

Prior to Covid-19, shops trading wildlife items, from ivory bangles to tortoise shells, relied heavily on tourists, forming partnerships with travel agents and tour guides.

Since the pandemic, and in many cases before it, traders have been moving their operations online, with more sellers springing up than being shut down.

Without a significant increase in effort from law enforcement agencies and online sales platforms, in-person sales are likely to pick up again once the pandemic recedes.

Aiding and abetting

Illegal wildlife traders will often pay guides and tourist offices a commission to send people their way, says Hong Hoang, founder and executive director of CHANGE, an environmental NGO based in Vietnam.

In 2018, Hong visited Mong Cai in northeastern Vietnam, on the border with China, as part of an undercover investigation with WildAid. Via a hidden camera, the team recorded shops selling ivory to buyers from China and Vietnam.


Ivory bracelets sold in Laos’ Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. Trade of elephant ivory is prohibited in China, but many Chinese tourists buy ivory in Southeast Asian countries. (Image: EIA)

Vietnam banned trade in ivory in 1992, but selling specimens produced before this date remained legal, allowing some shopkeepers to pass off recently carved ivory as old stock. Meanwhile, much illegal trade continues with impunity.

During Hong’s visit to Mong Cai, many shoppers appeared to be escorted by guides. “It was happening in broad daylight right under the noses of the police,” says Hong. The illegal wildlife trade within the tourism industry has “been there forever and everyone knows about it,” she adds.

Although improved policing means arrests related to wildlife crime are on the rise in Vietnam, the country’s reputation for patchy law enforcement endures.

Mong Cai, for example, is a notorious transit point for moving contraband across the border. After their 2018 trip, CHANGE and WildAid put up billboards and posters in the city, warning that buying, selling or possessing ivory carries a penalty of up to 15 years’ imprisonment.

“[But] it’s not just in the border town of Mong Cai,” says Hong. Wherever tourists flock, the black market in wildlife thrives. “It’s in Halong Bay, it’s in Nha Trang, it’s everywhere [in Vietnam]. We just don’t have a good chunk of money that we can dedicate to conduct a decent survey,” she adds.

Ivory still draws tourists

Until recently there has been little data on the scale of tourist sector complicity in the illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia.

Last year, WWF commissioned a survey on the ivory consumption of 3,000 Chinese travellers abroad. Respondents answered questions about their pre-pandemic trips to seven countries and territories, including Vietnam and Thailand, between August 2019 and January 2020. Of those who reported having visited a shop which sold ivory, 60% said they were referred there via a local guide, while 37% said tourist information centres had sent them there. In total, 6.8% ended up purchasing an ivory product. More than half (57%) of all respondents who visited an ivory retailer said the salesperson spoke Chinese.

Ivory is also popular among Thai and Vietnamese consumers. For some middle-class people with growing disposable income, ivory projects wealth and social status. Spiritual beliefs also play a part in its appeal.

The smaller the item, the more convenient it is for a tourist with a limited baggage allowance to travel with, and the more likely a seller will close a deal. Shipping companies and postal services also play a role by facilitating delivery, with 44% of customers having their purchase sent to them at home in China by mail, the WWF survey found.


An entrepreneur carves figures from mammoth tusk in Yakutsk

“People are smuggling small pieces and customs are basically overlooking it,” said Yoganand Kandasamy, regional lead for wildlife and wildlife crime at WWF Greater Mekong. “In fact, that’s what shops are marketing: when they sell an object to customers they say ‘You know, a small piece and nobody will bother you when you’re crossing the border.’”

He adds: “An individual buying an item weighing no more than 100 grams doesn’t sound like much. The problem is that we have something like 100 million travellers from mainland China coming to the region (Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and Japan), even if it’s just 10% of visitors buying these products, it adds up.”

Many unsuspecting tourists will inevitably be targeted by tour operators and tour guides in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. These people work with black-market traders, who are trained to sniff out potential buyers, not least to try and recover earnings lost to Covid lockdowns.

“People believe that ivory is bought by collectors. The reality is that most ivory is bought by tourists, by travellers – and it’s being pushed by the tourism industry,” said Wander Meijer, Asia Pacific director at GlobeScan, who conducted the survey on behalf of WWF.

It is not just ivory that is marketed to tourists. “Items such as marine turtle combs and fans, small and popular as souvenirs … have always [been]primarily targeted [at]tourists,” said Douglas Hendrie, enforcement director at Education for Nature Vietnam (ENV), a non-governmental organisation.

Online sales

E-commerce and social media help sell illegal wildlife products to tourists in Southeast Asia. Increasingly, tourist-focused businesses across the region are using these platforms to advertise and sell animal parts.

In the Laos capital of Vientiane, for example, illegal wildlife products are on open display in Sanjiang market, but much of the actual selling takes place online.

“They have QR codes you scan to friend them on WeChat. That opens up a whole album of products, which you can buy online through WeChat Pay and they arrange the delivery to your address in China,” says Debbie Banks, tigers and wildlife crime campaign lead for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). EIA have documented ivory bracelets, tiger teeth, tiger bone wine, helmeted hornbill casques (“red ivory”), bear bile pills, and rhino horn trinkets for sale in the market.

Digitally savvy sellers have been able to withstand the in-person sales slump caused by Covid-19 better than most.

For Hendrie, daily successes in suppressing wildlife crime are not keeping up with sales growth. “We are essentially throwing sand at an internet tide of sales,” he says.

Trade in tiger products ‘out of control’

In Vietnam, the sale and advertising of tiger parts and products is prohibited by law, but tiger bone “glue” – a thick paste made by boiling tiger bones with other ingredients – remains stubbornly popular, marketed as a cure for joint problems and a virility booster.


Animal bone “glue”, such as this, often contains parts of illegally traded wild animals. Tiger bone glue is marketed as a cure for joint problems and a virility booster. (Image: Soraya Kishtwari)

This too is marketed directly to tourists in Southeast Asia. In a reportpublished last year, EIA reproduced adverts from a tour operator and shipping specialist promoting tiger bone glue on its website to Vietnamese visitors to Thailand, making clear the operator could organise delivery for buyers.

Another operator advertised the opportunity to buy tiger bone glue as a reason to visit a “butterfly garden” near Bangkok. In a 2019 investigation, EIA documented how tourists visiting a retail park in Thailand were presented with sales pitches marketing tiger bone glue. Salespersons told coachloads of tourists, mostly from China and Vietnam, that “Going to Thailand without buying tiger bone glue is like you haven’t gone [to Thailand]”. This ignores the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna) ban on all international commercial trade in tigers and tiger parts.

“We know that Thailand caters to Vietnamese tour groups looking to purchase tiger bone traditional medicine. That’s part of the appeal — the opportunity to purchase ‘exotic’ products,” says Hendrie.

According to Banks, appetite for tiger products is increasingly endangering other cat species too: “African lion bone, teeth and claws are being sold as tiger; likewise jaguar teeth and claws.”

Wildlife restaurants

Southeast Asia’s special economic zones, such as the Golden Triangle where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet, and which are popular with tourists, remain “key hotspots for the illegal wildlife trade”, according to a survey by NGO TRAFFIC.

Certain restaurants have long been known to cater to tourists in search of exotic wild meat, according to Nguyen Van Thai, founding director of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife and recipient of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize for his work to protect pangolins. “When people are travelling to remote places, near forests, they want to eat something special from that region, and that often involves bushmeat,” Nguyen told China Dialogue.

• People don’t understand that they are supporting the illegal wildlife trade by consuming these protected species.

Van Thai, founding director of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife

Hong agrees. “Bushmeat is a huge issue we are dealing with, with tourists,” she says. “From government officials travelling to [rural]provinces on business, to tourists eating civets, pangolins and porcupines, people don’t understand that they are supporting the illegal wildlife trade by consuming these protected species.”

Even well-meaning travel guides and websites contribute to the problem by writing about animal-infused wines and other “exotic” local delicacies as a “must-try” experience for any seasoned world traveller. In many cases, they make no mention of the steep cost to locally endangered wildlife of such experiences.

Could ongoing public health concerns related to the link between zoonotic diseases and wildlife trade offer a chance to change consumer behaviour? Nguyen isn’t convinced: “People have been concerned about the health issues regarding eating wild meat since Covid, but people were also concerned before. Sars, HIV, avian influenza – it’s all related to wildlife consumption.”

Signs for the future

There were some promising developments last year. Twenty-one Chinese entities signed a pledge with WWF and the Global Sustainable Tourism Councilto tackle the interconnected issues of wildlife trafficking, plastic waste and food waste.

Then, in December, 30 representatives from Vietnam’s travel industry committed to supporting responsible tourism, including by protecting wildlife. They had been brought together by People and Nature Reconciliation, a Vietnamese NGO, and Vietnam’s Responsible Travel Club.

Vietnam has also “made great strides in the way it deals with wildlife crime,” says Hendrie. “Younger generations are less inclined to consume wildlife or use wildlife traditional medicine. Ivory is the exception to the rule, however.” At the lower end of the market, the sale of jewellery and carvings is increasing across all age groups, particularly online, he adds. Tiger and bear claws are also popular.

Research from China reveals a slightly different picture on ivory. In April, WWF revealed in its fourth annual ivory survey that Chinese consumer demand was at its lowest level since the ivory ban came into force, with the proportion of the population defined as “diehard buyers” dropping to 8% in 2020 – less than half of the 2017 pre-ban level. Yet demand among those who travel regularly abroad has not waned; individuals who travelled just before the pandemic closed borders purchased ivory in larger quantities than in 2017.

When the chance to travel opens up the evidence suggests there will be ample opportunities, often revealed by tour operators, to buy wildlife illegally once again.

Original: https://chinadialogue.net/en/nature/how ... ife-trade/