Major U.S. think tank delves into the challenges of illicit demand and trade in wildlife products in Asia

A vast and growing illegal trade in wildlife, estimated at US$5-10 billion a year, threatens to drive many species—from tigers to turtles—to extinction. Unfortunately, “there are no easy solutions to the problem; and almost every particular regulatory policy is either difficult to implement or entails difficult trade-offs and dilemmas.”

That is the gloomy conclusion of “The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia,” a report issued on June 30, 2011, by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington, D.C.-based think tank. In the report, Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown reviews the status of the illegal trade in wildlife, focusing primarily on Asia, and offers recommendations for addressing it.

Southeast and East Asia is a global hot spot for both legal and illegal trade in wildlife, but is by no means confined to this region. The largest demand market for illegal wildlife is China—followed by the United States, even though its relevant regulations and law enforcement are among the world’s strongest. Globalization and increasing prosperity have transformed traditional local markets for and consumption of wildlife (legal and illegal) into an international unsustainable business with disparate participants in the illegal trade from local poachers to traders who operate on a global scale, as well as militant groups such as the Taliban, which use the profits to fund their insurgencies.

Felbab-Brown is noted for her research on the relationship between illicit trade, particularly in narcotics, and insurgencies; she is the author of Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (2009). Her recent interest in the illegal trade in wildlife and in timber stems from this. An in-depth working paper, “Not as Easy as Falling Off a Log: The Illegal Logging Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies,” was released in March of this year. As she wrote in a recent email, “ . . . another important impetus for thinking about these other illicit economies has been that I’ve often seen how the suppression of one illicit economy (namely the drug trade – the preoccupation of NATO and the international community in a variety of settings) often results in many detrimental side effects, such as the strengthening of other illegal economies, like logging and the wildlife trade . . .” She also points out a significant difference between illegal trade in drugs, which are a renewable resource, and that in wildlife species which, once gone, are gone forever.

Comparatively few resources are devoted to either reducing the supply of wildlife through law enforcement or bans or reducing demand for wildlife. Even if adequate resources were available, even the strongest of law enforcement measures could only do so much to reduce the supply. And, among others, one downside of law enforcement, Felbab-Brown notes, is that it very often weeds out incompetent criminals while encouraging smugglers and traders to become larger, more professional, and more lethal. Similarly, bans may be effective in some cases, but they tend to make the banned species more valuable when scarcity drives up its price in the black market. Other supply-side measures, such as certification or managed hunting, also receive mixed reviews in the report, and, Felbab-Brown concludes, all may help to reduce the trade in some situations, but to effect real change, “tackling the demand for wildlife is absolutely critical.” And absolutely difficult.

There is no magic formula for reducing demand for wildlife because the users of wildlife do so for different reasons and in different social contexts. Marginalized rural or forest-living people may entirely depend on wildlife for protein; this demand cannot be reduced unless these people are supplied with alternatives. At the other end of the spectrum, wealthy individuals own, wear, or eat illegal wildlife to demonstrate their high status. Running the gamut are consumers of wildlife as traditional medicines and tonics. And even if ways to alter the behavior of these various consumers could be identified, behavior changes takes time, perhaps too much time to save species such as tigers and rhinos tottering on the brink of extinction.

The report concludes with twelve broad policy recommendations for reducing the illegal wildlife trade. Focusing on the critical issues of demand reduction, for example, she advises that general awareness programs can’t be relied upon—messages have to be designed specifically to reach the various kinds of consumers. Also very important is that programs be delivered by local messengers. In Asia and elsewhere, the attempts of Western NGOs to change socially ingrained behavior may be perceived as imperialism, and thus ignored.

These and other insights provided in this report will contribute to planning the GTI’s Global Support Program (GSP) for Demand Reduction. This GSP is called for in the Global Tiger Recovery Program.

The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia

Not as Easy as Falling Off a Log: The Illegal Logging Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies

Audio of the June 30 event at Brookings Institution- “The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia” – Length: 01:32:25 (42MB)