Should the market decide fate of endangered wildlife?

Our planet is now losing species at a faster rate than at any other time in its history. To stem this irreversible tide, the 183 member states of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), currently meeting in South Africa, need to get real and pass all proposals that maximise protection of endangered species, and oppose those that open up trade in endangered species, as a matter of urgency and common sense.  

As with each CITES meeting, pro-trade and anti-trade factions have emerged in Johannesburg. I have been attending CITES meetings since 1992, and the arguments being used by both sides are largely the same as ever. Some participants, including trade lobbyists, treat CITES as a global commodities market. There are even economists walking around plugging new algorithms that show how a controlled legal trade in rhino horn will increase rhino numbers.  NGOs are holding side meetings to lobby for stricter controls.  

Pro-trade elements point to the fact that CITES is a trade convention, not a protection organisation, and that good science – not emotion – should dictate whether one species or sub-species should be allocated a commercial trade quota or not. They add that a trade ban in one country where numbers of a particular species are low should not apply to another country where numbers are stable.  

The experiment with elephants

The anti-trade side pleads for caution, claiming that a legal trade in commercially valuable species could sound their death knell because criminal traffickers know no boundaries and will use legal channels to launder poached wildlife. I am on this side – precaution, because of what I have seen over the years tracking wildlife criminals. They love it when CITES gives them an opportunity to mask their illegal trade.

Elephants are a great example of the debate and the real dangers.  

In the recent past, CITES allowed some countries with stable elephant populations to legally sell their stocks of tusks in order to secure money for their government and to sustain their conservation efforts. Those limited sales quotas sent ivory prices up, leading wholesale (including underground) buyers to go on a buying binge, which has increased the slaughter to an average of one elephant killed by poachers every 15 minutes in Africa today. The limited legal trade did not work because enforcement along the supply chains was still not stronger than organised crime, which exploited and strengthened corruption in order to circumvent CITES and kill more elephants.  

There are other examples as well.

Thailand’s tiger farms

Tigers have been on the endangered list since CITES launched four decades ago.  Some countries attempted to simultaneously conserve and sell tigers by creating tiger farms. The theory was that the demand for tiger body parts is strong, tigers breed like domestic cats, so why not breed them, feed the demand, and thereby reduce pressure on wild tigers. China, Thailand and later Vietnam and Laos all started tiger farms. Poaching of wild tigers went up, not down.  While some pro-trade experts say there is no correlation between the increase in commercial breeding and poaching, Freeland has direct evidence of the correlation. Imprisoned traffickers have told Freeland how they deliberately tried to compete and undermine tiger farm sales by going out and buying more and cheaper tigers from the wild.  The experiment in legal trade of this endangered species has been disastrous.

But why give up?  The pro-trade forces decided to extend the experiment to bears.  

Bear farms popped up in largely the same countries to produce a supply of bear gallbladders for the market in traditional so-called medicine. Once again, this experiment stimulated a larger market.  Traffickers in turn found multiple sources for supply, including the farms and the forests. Poaching of bears in places like Russia and even North America went up.

Truth about crocodile farming 

In 2004 CITES passed a resolution allowing for sport hunting of rhinos, which meant hunters could take the horn home and put it on their wall. Organised crime quickly found a way to sponsor numerous hunts to get the horn and sell on the black market. Buyers saw a future in horn and poaching went up.

Pro-trade forces point to crocodile farming as their big success.

However, while crocodile farming has actually led to an increase in wild populations in a few countries, it directly led to poaching and the near extermination of crocs in most range states. This is a bad example to hold up as a success.

It is time for CITES members  – at least a majority – to acknowledge that international commercial trade in endangered species does not work in almost any case, and should therefore be abandoned as an incredibly dangerous practice. We should not treat global biodiversity as a stock-and-commodities market to be exploited and manipulated for personal commercial gain. These are stocks that do not recover if we get the algorithm wrong.

A number of large organisations, including CITES, have pointed out that corruption and lack of enforcement are the real issues that CITES must focus on. Evidence and history point clearly to the fact that any legal trade in endangered species – however limited – facilitates corruption, which in turn leads to more poaching and trafficking.

It is time for CITES to stop flirting with disaster.  

 

Steven Galster is director of Freeland (www.freeland.org).