The illegal wildlife trade
China’s desire for exotic animals, tastes and products will probably
push wild elephants, rhinos, pangolins and many other species to extinction
within the next 10 to 15 years. This trade is destabilizing many African
countries as poachers, armed by organized criminal syndicates, outgun security
forces, loot villages and decimate animal populations. Their bloody haul is
mostly transported by Asian agents who bribe officials and undermine the
security of national states. We begin in the lawless, drug-soaked jungles of
Asia’s Golden Triangle.
Part 1
Markets of
death
The Asian end
of a grisly business
In the jungle
along the Mekong River is a palatial casino named Kings Romans where you can
order freshly killed bear cub steak, grilled pangolin, tiger penis or gecko
fillet and wash them down with wine matured in a vat containing lion bones.
The shop offers
rhino horn libation cups and bracelets or, for more conventional tastes, religious
sculptures and jewelry made from poached African ivory. After a night at the
gambling tables you can pay a beautiful young woman to accompany you to bed.
Chinese guests are preferred.
If you’re unable
to settle your gambling debts, however, you will be locked in the local jail
until your relatives pay. If they don’t you could, apparently, be led into the
jungle and shot. (See Sin City https://eia-international.org/)
Kings Romans is one of a number of such
establishments in the Golden Triangle, thickly forested borderlands between
Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China. It’s an area of lawlessness and rebel armies
from which much of the world’s heroin and amphetamines come. Similar ‘resorts’
include Allure, God of Fortune, Fantasy Garret, Regina, Mong Lah and Boten. The
area is a conduit of death for an unimaginable number of Africa’s iconic
animals.
This information
is offered matter-of-factly over a cup of coffee in Cape Town’s Waterfront by
an unusual, Kenyan-based undercover investigator and self-confessed
troublemaker named Karl Ammann. Unusual because he works alone and digs out
explosive information at, often, considerable financial cost to himself. A
troublemaker because he’s uncompromising in exposing wildlife traffickers as
well as governments and respected international conservation organisations when they become part of the problem.
His motivations – being inquisitive and a
fierce desire to protect wildlife – are often suspect because he has no
political or organizational affiliations. He’s an elegant, widely traveled,
deeply knowledgeable, principled maverick and delightful company. But how
reliable was his information? Corroboration came from a startling report, Sin City, completed last year by the
Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in conjunction with Education for
Nature Vietnam. https://eia-international.org/wp-content/uploads/EIA-Sin-City-FINAL-med-res.pdf
‘Laos,’ begins the report, ‘has become a
lawless playground, catering to the desires of visiting Chinese gamblers and
tourists who can openly purchase and consume illegal wildlife products and
parts, including those of endangered tigers.
‘There is not even a pretense of enforcement. Sellers
and buyers are free to trade a host of endangered species products including
tigers, leopards, elephants, rhinos, pangolins, helmeted hornbills, snakes and
bears, poached from Asia and Africa, and smuggled to this small haven for
wildlife crime. [It is] largely catering to growing numbers of Chinese visitors.’
Ammann began
exploring the jungle regions of Southeast Asia while visiting his brother who
ran a hotel in Bangkok and discovered the village of Mong La in Boko Province,
the last Burmese outpost before China. ‘That was 40 years ago,’ he says
wistfully. ‘Today it’s another sordid casino town thriving on drugs and
prostitution, but then it was beautiful. I made contacts, went on expeditions,
met hill tribes.’
On return visits
he realized things were changing fast and he began to document them. Wildlife
trading was becoming an issue and he used his connections to probe it, first
with questions and later with sophisticated button cameras and secret
recordings.
‘Because of my
economic background (he worked in hotel finance), I was fascinated by the
changing dynamic from sleepy hill station to illicit marketplace and conduit
into China,’ he says. ‘I was able to track changes in the area and thought I
could make a contribution to conservation by letting the world know. It became
something of an obsession.’
Those changes were
to be devastating for elephants, rhinos, pangolin, tigers, bears and many
creatures interesting to Oriental taste, superstition and aesthetic. In the
uncontrolled, drug-saturated Golden Triangle, the illicit was profitable and
law the prerogative of anyone wealthy enough to arm and command unscrupulous
men. The area was to become, alongside trafficking of narcotics and humans,
China’s illegal wildlife supermarket. Ammann tried to get information out about
what was going on but, he says, nobody seemed interested. The area was a blank
on the media map.
The transformation
of Mong La became a model for the establishment of lawless outposts across the
region catering for Chinese customers in search of products and pleasures
forbidden in their country. Over the Burmese border in Laos, a Chinese company
acquired a 99-year lease on 10 000 hectares of riverside jungle and built Kings
Romans Casino, giving the government a 20% stake. Around 3 000 hectares have
been declared a ‘special economic zone’ – essentially a private fiefdom. Clocks
there run in Beijing time, trade is done in Chinese currency and businesses are
Chinese owned.
These casino towns
make their own rules. Sellers and buyers are free to trade endangered species
and governments within the Golden Triangle curb any potential law enforcement. According
to the EIA report, ‘the blatant illegal wildlife trade by Chinese companies in
this part of Laos should be a national embarrassment and yet it appears to
enjoy high-level political support from the Laos Government, blocking any
potential law enforcement.’
Other developments include a private landing
dock for boats, a hotel, massage parlours, museums, gardens, a temple, banquet
halls, an animal enclosure, a shooting range and a large banana plantation. With
complete confidence about protection from any known law, illegal wildlife trade
is booming.
Ammann acknowledges the value of reports such
as Sin City and the integrity of the
EIA, but tells me they don’t go deep enough. ‘You can’t find out about these
networks the way conservation NGOs do by going around with a notebook logging
items. You have to infiltrate,’ he says, hunching over his coffee and looking
the part. ‘That means buying from sellers – and I do that.
‘The moment money
changes hands it becomes much easier. You get information you wouldn’t get by
just snooping around. So I’m pushing the envelope, which most NGOs have a
problem with.
‘I send in my guys
as bogus sellers of rhino horn. They show photographs and say: “We can get
access to this. How much would you offer?” In contraband investigation that’s
pretty common, but in the wildlife trade few people are willing to go to that
extent. If I give NGOs this data they say they need to verify it. But they’re
not prepared to use my methods, so how can they do that?’
Ammann’s methods
of tracing networks through secret recordings and a bogus website he set up
have paid off. He has traced the circuitous smuggling routes out of Africa and
tracked down crooked officials and countless bogus CITES export/import permits.
He found that the
wildlife trade in China to be dominated by a handful of key players who are
behind the container imports. They have the infrastructure in Africa to get the
containers loaded and shipped. They work with retailers, sending cellphone
pictures ahead signaling, say, 20 rhino horns on the way. They’ve operated with
port authorities and key dealers for many years.
In 2008 China
legally bought 66 tonnes of Ivory from African in a CITES-sanctioned sale and
built the world’s largest ivory-carving factory. Two years before that it had
listed ivory carving as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.
According to a
report, Out of Africa, by C4ADS and the
Born Free Foundation, China presently has 37 registered (and countless
unregistered) carving factories and 145 retail outlets. A survey of the outlets
found that most ivory items had no identity cards, meaning their source was
illegal. In 2013 a contraband seizure in Guangzhou included 1 913 tusks – meaning
almost one thousand dead elephants. (www.bornfreeusa.org/a9_out_of_africa.php)
A 2002 document sourced
by the EIA includes a Chinese official reporting the loss of 99 tonnes of ivory
from government stockpiles – greater than the amount procured in the 2008
one-off sale. An NGO report in 2013 estimated that 70% of the ivory circulating
in China was illicit, and that 57% of licensed ivory facilities were laundering
illegal ivory.
‘I’m not sure to what extent China’s
enforcement activity is real,’ says Ammann. ‘It’s mostly for Western
consumption. They sacrifice a shipment every now and then and that’s probably
part of the plan. Maybe they give the container back to the dealer after six
months.
‘If traders get a
tipoff that the Chinese government is curbing the sale of ivory in China, they
send the message down the line saying shift your ivory somewhere else. Laos,
Burma, Vietnam.
‘That’s where some
of the big dealers have set up their operations, places like Kings Romans. It
just means the conduit routes to China are shifting. Sales in China may be
going down, but just over the border they’re going through the roof.
‘Hong Kong is now
coming under pressure, so dealers no longer see it as the future of rhino horn
or ivory trade. They’re looking for new outlets in the Golden Triangle, Luang Prabang and Vientiane in Laos and in Vietnam.
And if you put pressure on those countries, it will probably move to Cambodia.’
The truth is that
the demand for wild animals alive or dead remains high, which is not good news
for Africa’s animals. ‘Wildlife traders are running circles round us,’ says
Ammann, glancing at his watch because he has another appointment. ‘They’re
fooling us and most of them are Asian. And most of the NGOs – EIA is the
exception – have operations in China or Thailand or whatever so they can’t rock
the boat too much. For an NGO, being banned from a region is a big problem.
‘They can be the
good cop but can’t afford to play the bad cop. I can afford to be that cop. The
problem is getting the information out. Where and how can it make a
difference?’
The only hope for
elephants and rhinos and other creatures, he says, is if the risk factor is
ratcheted up with some of the lynchpins ending up in jail. Hit the supply
chains.
‘If the world
really became serious about enforcement instead of becoming serious about
talking about enforcement, it would be a major step in the right direction. But
it will only come on the back of face loss. We have to name and shame.
‘But for myself, I
want to be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. So I keep
telling the facts and truth as I see them knowing fully well that I will not
win any popularity contests.’
Part 2
Permits signed
in blood
How cheating officials undermine CITES
regulation
In 1973 the
United Nations drafted an agreement – the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) – to protect all non-human
living things from cross-border exploitation. If it’s judged by that which it
seeks to prevent, the agreement is a failure.
After drugs and
human trafficking, illicit wildlife trade has become the third most lucrative
crime in the world. Yet in the past 20 years not a single ‘kingpin’ trafficker
has been arrested and prosecuted - either at the production or consumer end of
the supply chain.
This year CITES
delegates from 180 countries will be meeting on African soil for the first
time. The question they urgently need to ask as they gather in Johannesburg is
whether failure to curb this trade is because such crime is beyond the reach of
any agreement, or because of failings within the CITES regulatory process. If
previous such meetings are a gauge, this is a question unlikely to be asked.
CITES spends millions
of dollars to ensure that the future of endangered species is being taken care
of. The backbone of this process is its permitting system which regulates
international trade. Karl Ammann has found disturbing gaps in this process,
causing him to question the value of the CITES mechanisms and the honesty of
many of its officials.
‘They’re not
really conservationists,’ he says ‘It’s all about not rocking the boat and
pretending everything is hunky dory and that they’re fulfilling their role. Any
information that doesn’t fit their picture, they try to cover up.
‘I’ve publicly
accused them of covering up a wide range of criminal activities. I have the
evidence. I’ve asked them to take me to court so I can present information they
ignore. They won’t. Even with solid evidence, they’re actively covering up for
China. So where do you go?’
An accusation like
that needs strong proof to back it, I tell him. Can he supply that? For the
next two days my inbox pings constantly with documents, reports and photographs
that make for startling reading.
According to the
CITES website, permits for the trans-shipment of animals, reptiles, fish or
plants are issued in terms of three Appendices, depending on the degree of
protection a species needs. If a creature is listed as Appendix 1, an import and export permit should only be issued if it is not
going to be a commercial transaction, has been legally obtained and the
animal’s removal is not detrimental to the survival of the species.
For the last point
– survival – an exporting country has to provide a ‘non-detriment finding’ done
by the CITES scientific authority, which is meant to be a check on that
country’s management authority. Wild-caught, Appendix-1-listed creatures cannot
be exported for commercial or zoo purposes.
For Appendices 2
and 3 – species not endangered – export permits, but not import permits, are
required and conditions are generally less stringent.
In this process, the
devil is in the detail. If a creature is bred in captivity, whatever the status
of its wild cousins, it’s ‘source code’ on the permit is listed as ‘C’ (captive
bred) and it can be traded.
This has led to
what Ammann calls the ‘C-scam’ and has been used, for example, to illegally
export hundreds of wild-caught chimps and gorillas to China from African
countries that have no captive breeding facilities. CITES officials in the
exporting and importing countries, he says, must know this but supply the permits
anyway and turn a blind eye.
The UN Office of Drugs and Crime acknowledges
the complicity of CITES officials in permit scams. ‘Corruption,’ it says ‘involves
a variety of actors, including the CITES competent authorities, public officials,
villagers, forest rangers, police, customs, traders and brokers,
professional/international hunters, logistics companies (shipping lines,
airlines), veterinarians, and game farmers, among others.’ (www.u4.no/publications/wildlife-crime-and-corruption/)
There’s another
problem. Originally all permits had to be conduited through the CITES head
office in Geneva for inspection. But in 2002, claiming budgetary restraints,
the CITES secretariat unilaterally decided that permits need only be cleared by
its officials in the countries concerned and only reported in summary to
Geneva.
It also
discontinued ‘infraction reporting’, done when member states were suspected of not
acting in compliance with Convention rules and where corrupt and criminal acts might
have been committed. For poachers the leaky process was heaven-sent.
At the 2002 CITES
meeting that year, the host country, Chile, called for a mechanism to urgently
limit the circulation of CITES permits to avoid their fraudulent use, but the
Secretariat shot down the proposal on technicalities.
According to
Ammann, the point was made at the time that countries with poor governance
records had resisted exposure to a ‘name and shame’ regime administered from
Geneva. So CITES policy makers decided the easiest way to solve infractions was
to stop looking for them.
‘The philosophy of
the Secretariat seemed to be that it wasn’t a good idea for people all sitting
in a glass house to throw stones,’ says Ammann, staring sadly over the Cape
docks as seagulls scream at us for tidbits. ‘It was the end of effective
regulation of trade in many endangered species.’
Officials,
syndicates and poachers in certain CITES countries with valuable wild species
quickly realized that less control meant more opportunities to advance personal
interests. Some dealers assembled special wild population capture teams. A
CITES official in Guinea told Ammann: ‘CITES is the dirtiest of the conventions
when it comes to the falsification of permits and fraud.’
By infiltrating
networks, Ammann obtained a sheaf of permits from traders involved in a wide
range of such transactions. They were using the Middle East and North Africa as
transit points, mostly falsely declaring these countries as the points of
origin based on permits stating that the primates were captive-born. When
Ammann presented the head of a CITES delegation in Geneva with documentary
evidence of this, the official claimed it was fake and threw the report into
the street outside the conference centre.
‘There are
worldwide mafia networks of interlinked dealers conducting their business
openly,’ says Ammann. ‘They all claim to have good relations with the relevant
CITES management authorities and are able to get pretty much any CITES export
or import permit they want. The standard fee asked for an illegal permit across
Central Africa is US$5000.’
The buyer is then free
to stipulate whether the source code is wild or captive born and the management
authority will fill in whatever the buyer requires. They don’t need a detailed
address of a shipment’s destination.
‘Anybody can fill
in pretty much anything with regard to the final destination or the facility
sending or receiving them. I analyzed over 100 such
permits and not a single one had the required exit stamps, or information from
the relevant customs authorities about the specific animal or numbers actually
inside the crate.’
One permit for two
tortoises was used to sanction supply of two elephants. A permit issued for
African grey parrots was used to export four African manatees to China. Some
animals were shipped from Guinea with a falsified DRC permit.
On at least two
occasions, traffickers told Ammann that if the buyer insisted on a proper but
falsified permit for apes, they’d make sure their own CITES official would not
file the duplicate copies of the permits when they did their annual reports to
Geneva.
In Japan, the
Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) found that after CITES approved
‘experimental’ lifting of the ban on ivory trade in 1999 and 2008, the sale of
illegal ivory skyrocketed, as did poaching in Africa. Even after the ban was
reinstated, the EIA found that more than 1000 tusks of dubious origin were
being traded in Japan each year, many probably sold on to China.
Between 2010 and
2012, a Chinese husband-and-wife team was caught smuggling almost 3.26 tons of
ivory from Japan into mainland China using Chinese nationals in Japan as
intermediaries.
The EIA described
the trade as loopholes within loopholes: ‘Japan is awash with ivory and not a
shred of real evidence is required by law to ensure that ivory is of legal
origin and acquisition.
‘There’s no doubt
that hundreds of fake and falsified permits are being issued annually,’ says
Ammann. ‘In terms of bribes collected, hundreds of thousands of dollars are
ending up with dealers who use the money to pay corrupt CITES officials.’
Member governments
are obliged to prosecute offending traders and officials based on illegal
activity. They must then confiscate the animals in question and discuss with
the countries of origin a possible return of the animals. That’s the theory. In
practice there appears resistance at every level, starting with the CITES
Secretariat which will not push members to have this enforced.
‘The question that needs to be asked,’ says
Ammann, ‘is whether this lack of will by the Secretariat to enforce the
Convention is a major contributing factor to these illegal transactions? Is
illegal trade being actively encouraged by this lack of control?’
Ammann recently had a conversation with a top UN official who knew
what was on his mind when requesting the meeting. The first question came from the
official: ‘Are we better off with CITES or without it?’ It was clearly what
critical observers had been asking many times before.
‘There’s little doubt,’ said Ammann, ‘that in most cases he gets
the answer he’s looking for: Whatever the flaws, we’re better off with
some kind of regulatory framework than without one. My response at the
time was the same. Today I am no longer sure.’
With many recent permit
infractions, China seems to be the main beneficiary and appears to have been
granted a special ‘hands off’ status to do as it pleases. As long as Chinese
demand exists and circumventing international conventions has no consequences,
the killing and trading will go on.
China’s Wildlife Protection Law is
presently undergoing its first major revision in 26 years since it came into
force. There was hope that this would signal a crackdown on poaching and
wildlife trade. However, the draft, currently under public consultation, states
that wildlife can be used in the manufacture of Chinese traditional
medicine, healthcare products and food for profit. According to the EIA, if
this draft becomes law it would open, rather than close the loopholes in
wildlife trafficking. (https://eia-international.org/chinas-new-wildlife-law-falling-short-of-ecological-civilisation)
When COP17 (not to
be confused with the climate change COP17) meets in Johannesburg in June this
year, will delegates debate the CITES’s permitting problems? If Ammann is to
believed, don’t hold your breath.
Part 3
A shameful
harvest
How Chinese
tastes feed a killing frenzy
Africa’s
extraordinary and charismatic wildlife is clearly under siege from the wrecking
ball of Chinese demand. Heading the list of critically damaged species are
elephants. As the world’s largest consumer, Chinese hunger for ivory is
stimulating transnational organized crime, trashing ecosystems, flooding areas with
weapons, perverting legal systems and causing mounting tension in
elephant-range communities.
According to detailed
reports by international environmental organisations such as the Born Free
Foundation and the Environmental Investigation Agency, Chinese nationals have
been involved in ivory-related offenses in virtually every African range state.
They’re closely connected to all steps along the ivory value chain other than
physical poaching, for which they use African proxies. At Bole Airport in
Ethiopia, a conduit for flights to Asia, a CITES report noted that more than 85
percent of transit passengers who were caught with illegal ivory in 2014 were
Chinese. (www.cites.org/eng/com/sc/65/E-SC65-42-01.pdf)
Beyond Africa’s
borders, Chinese nationals operate illicit networks that liaise with African
poaching gangs, set up shell companies, bribe cargo handlers at various ports,
then move the product through Asian entry points for sale to carving factories.
The Born Free Foundation
has estimated that around 70 per cent of ivory in Chinese markets is illegal
and the laundering of illegal wildlife products is widespread. Its report Africa’s Curse, written with C4ADS, describes
the ivory trade as a massive, ongoing illicit resource transfer from Africa to Asia:
‘It’s robbing
local communities of an important source of potential wealth, destroying the
potential of critical economic sectors such as tourism and financing a wide
range of predatory and corrupt actors across the continent. Locals incur the
majority of risk and bear the majority of costs, but receive the minority of
profits.’
Chinese law
prevents the killing and sale of protected species and last year Premier Xi
Jinping pledged to enact ‘a near complete ban’ on the import and export of
ivory. China’s Wildlife Protection Law is
presently undergoing its first major revision in 26 years since it came into
force.
There was hope that
this would signal a crackdown on poaching and wildlife trade. However, the draft,
currently under public consultation, states that wildlife can be used in the
manufacture of Chinese traditional medicine, healthcare products and food
for profit. According to the EIA, if this draft becomes law it would open,
rather than close the loopholes in wildlife trafficking. (https://eia-international.org/chinas-new-wildlife-law-falling-short-of-ecological-civilisation)
Elephants Without
Borders estimates Africa’s present elephant population at about 600 000. Using
carcass counts and consignment seizure numbers, researchers calculate that – between
2009 and 2015 – around 230 000 elephants were poached. TRAFFIC, an
investigation agency established by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature, found that in 2013 the kill
rate was running at 50 000 a year yielding roughly 400 tonnes of ivory.
The effect on
herds is devastating. By targeting tuskers, poachers are culling prime-aged
males, skewing sex ratios and disrupting families, resulting in increased
number of orphans. In short, elephant populations are crashing and, within most
of our lifetimes, they will probably become extinct in the wild. This is also
true for rhinos, pangolins, tigers, black bears and many other species that are
victims of the Asian market.
According to the
report Ivory’s Curse by the Born Free
Foundation, there are three main elephant killing fields with a fourth,
Southern Africa, soon to follow as more northerly herds are shot out. These are
West Africa, the Congo Basin (home to forest elephants) and the East African
savanna. (http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-Ivorys-Curse-2014.pdf)
In these areas, according
to the report, ivory poaching has increasingly become a lifeline commodity for militias
excluded from the global financial system such as the Lords Resistance Army in
Uganda, the Sudanese Janjaweed and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Much of the killing
has been to fund wars, UNITA in Angola and the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia being past
examples.
Large tracts of northern
and central Africa are ungoverned and highly insecure for both humans and
elephants, providing easy access for armed groups. North and South Sudan have
been almost entirely stripped of once-huge herds of elephant, buffalo, giraffe
and zebra. The ongoing conflict in South Sudan has seen the elephant population
there drop from 130 000 to fewer than 5 000 today.
North Sudanese
militias sanctioned by the Khartoum government – including the Janjaweed which
committed the Darfur atrocities – were reported to be mounting ivory raids into
Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of
Congo. In the DRC they compete with the Congolese army, FARDC, who are the
region’s worst poachers. This hunting is a continuation of wildlife harvesting
across equatorial Africa that saw more than three million elephants killed in
the 19th century.
Equatorial
poaching is increasingly targeting secretive forest elephants which have harder
ivory favoured by Japanese carvers for hanko
stamps used to mark documents with sealing wax. In Gabon, commercial logging –
largely under Chinese concessions – is driving roads deep into the rainforest,
providing access to poachers who use logging containers packed on site to
smuggle ivory.
However, according
to Ivory’s Curse, the highest level
of elephant poaching is in East Africa where the main enabler is not armed
militias but state corruption. Between 2010-2012, without legal documentation, hundreds
of live animals were captured and shipped out of Tanzania, in one case on a
Qatari military plane.
Ivory tops the
list, however, and Tanzania is the poaching epicenter. In the 1970s the
Selous-Mikumi region in southern Tanzania had one of the world’s great elephant
herds – well over 100 000. Today there are about 13 000. Poaching is done with
military precision and brook no interference. Last month poachers shot and
killed the pilot of a conservation agency helicopter which was tracking them.
The situation is
similar in Kenya. In 1979 it had 167 000 elephants, today only about 28 000
survive. In Mozambique, nearly 20 000 elephants and all of its rhinos were
poached between 2009 and 2013.
Born Free warns
that Southern Africa, with two thirds of Africa’s surviving elephants, is the
last haven. The area, it says, is likely to see a rapid increase in poaching in
the near future as elephant populations decline elsewhere.
There are already
alarming incidents, such as the ongoing cyanide poisoning of waterholes in
Zimbabwe which has killed hundreds of elephants and other animals. Rampant
rhino poaching in Kruger Park serves as a warning about the difficulty of
ensuring the future of southern
elephants.
What is to be
done? A study, Species of Crime, by Jackson
Miller, Varun Vira, and Mary Utermohlen on African wildlife trafficking (http://ejfphilanthropies.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/species-of-crim.pdf) says that
understanding the flow of ivory is essential if it’s to be contained.
‘Ivory flows
upstream along its value chain, from low-value poaching in the “bush” across
Africa into the hands of established African and Asian criminal networks. These
move it through the international transport system to market tens of thousands
of miles away.
‘After a tusk is
removed from an elephant, there is an abrupt transfer from the non-professional
but often highly militarized poaching networks that carry out the killing, to
more professional trafficking networks. These are capable of nesting their illicit
activities within the legal international trade and transportation systems.’
The value of ivory
or any poached species increases in value with the distance from the actual
killing. On average, the price increase for ivory between the poacher and final
sale in China is around 4 000%. In line with their particular skills, each actor
occupies a unique place in this value chain. One of these, often unknown to
themselves, are legitimate container firms.
According to the Species of Crime report, many Asian
organized crime networks such as the Triads appear to be consolidating and
expanding their operational range on both ends of the chain. They’re reaching
ever closer to the actual source of ivory in Africa, while expanding from
trafficking into the Asian retail sectors, then deeper into direct involvement
with black market carving factories.
With increasingly
professionalized networks, they’re also involved in the movement of abalone, narcotics,
weapons, precious minerals such as diamonds and coltan, human trafficking and
money laundering.
According to Ivory’s Curse, the way to contain
poaching is to harden the environment through which ivory moves, making
transmission too costly and dangerous for traffickers. Given the poverty in
Africa and the remoteness of wild animal ranges, it says, the actual killing is
difficult to stop. Changing marked tastes at the Asian end of the chain may also
take too long, leading to species extinction before it becomes effective.
The vulnerable
point is the transmission network – forest edge to African ports and landing
ports in Asia. If these could be hit hard, says the report, with kingpin
traffickers ending in jail and consignments constantly disrupted, it would make
the whole exercise too costly for traffickers and stifle the value chain.
The biggest
stumbling block, according to the Born Free Foundation, is corrupt officials,
particularly in Africa. This corruption, it says, goes all the way from crooked
customs, CITES, police and park officials to entire government departments and
elected executives.
As China increases
its investment and influence in Africa, governments are clearly unwilling to
upset relationships by condemning the damaging environmental practices that follow
the Asian giant’s voracious demand for the continent’s raw materials.
The massive
decline of elephants and rhinos are just two of many examples that suffer from
this lack of restraint or official sanction. As earlier colonial regimes have
demonstrated throughout history, there is a permiable margin between commercial
extraction and looting.
Sidebar
Africa’s dying
elephants
