A multi-billion dollar business
The illegal wildlife trade is big business. The range of estimates from international organisations including the OECD, INTERPOL and TRAFFIC-International put it at between US$7-23 billion annually. Of course it is difficult to give it a precise value because it is, by its very nature, in the shadows. Profiles of demand and supply can also change rapidly, and the illegal trade is often mixed with a legal trade.
In recent years, the rising poaching rates for elephants, rhinos, tigers and pangolins have hit the headlines. Such levels of international attention were last seen in the late 1980s, when concerns about plummeting elephant populations in Africa led to the global ban on the ivory trade in 1989. Elephants, rhinos and tigers get most of the attention, and are referred to as ‘charismatic megafauna’; they are high profile large animals beloved of (especially Western) publics. But the wildlife trade encompasses a much wider range of species, which Bob Smith and colleagues have called ‘Cinderella species’. These species are less well known, not as cute or majestic, and are traded every day, around the world, as pets, food, jewellery, clothing and medicines. This implicates far more people, including those based in the Global North, in the illegal trade.

Let’s take the little known Vietnamese psychedelic rock gecko as an example. Global trade in this species was banned in 2016 by a decision made under the Convention of the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). In force since 1975, this is the main international body responsible for governing the wildlife trade, legal and illegal, and has 183 states signed up as parties to it. In the run-up to the CITES Seventeenth Conference of Parties concerns had been growing that the rock gecko was being pushed to extinction by a growing demand from the pet trade. Anecdotally, live pairs were offered for approximately €3,000 at reptile shows in Europe and Russia. Implicitly acknowledging the role of European consumers in generating demand for the gecko, it was the European Union that jointly tabled a motion with Vietnam to place the animal on the CITES ‘Appendix I’ banned list.
International inequality
Put simply, then, the illegal wildlife trade it is part of the fabric of patterns of global consumption (sometimes literally so, in the case of python skins). While China is commonly identified as ‘the problem’ by conservationists, it must be recognised that the European Union and the USA are the top three markets for illegal wildlife products. As such, it is just as important to reflect on the ways that Europeans and North Americans purchase illegally traded wildlife products, often unwittingly.

Confiscated wildlife products at JFK Airport
For example, Southeast Asian pythons are listed under CITES Appendix II, which means a legal, monitored trade is permitted under certain conditions. A shipment of 10,000 python skins can be worth US$ 900,000 on the international market. Each year approximately 350,000 python skins are exported, the majority from Indonesia and Malaysia. However, an estimated 73% are sourced from the wild, rather than being captive bred. Skins from pythons, caught illegally in the wild, can be easily concealed as part of shipments of legally farmed skins; consignments can be deliberately mislabelled or wrongly declared to avoid inspection by customs officers. Stockpiling and re-export also add to the layers of complexity. For example, traders in Singapore sometimes stockpile skins imported from other countries in the region, for re-export to Europe in the future. But all this begs the question: why are Asian python skins in such high demand that it is worth taking the risks of trading them illegally?
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