Wildlife Trafficking, Organized Crime & You

With recent reports about the Italian Mafia attempting to control wind power development in Sicily and some disturbing stats about tiger populations have dropped 97% in the past two decades, a recent article in New Scientist on your role role in wildlife crime, increasingly linked to organized crime syndicates worldwide, is particularly timely.

Increasingly, Rosaleen Duffy from the University of Manchester says, it's not poverty that's driving the global trade in endangered species, but wealth.

The words "wildlife trade" conjure up images of rhino horn, tiger parts, bushmeat and ivory being poached and smuggled in distant and poverty-stricken parts of the world. We tend to blame such trading on poorer communities, either because they are greedy and don't care about wildlife or so poverty-stricken that they have no choice.

In reality, we are all participants in the wildlife trade. Wealthy consumers use wildlife for food, medicine, fashion, pets and furniture, and this is largely what drives the legal and illegal trades in shellfish, meat, leather, live animals, skins and bones.

Duffy goes on to say that without the increasing demand from rich countries, there is no incentive for poorer people to engage in poaching (often at the behest of gangster middlemen) or smuggling. Without increasing demand for electronics, the profit in conflict minerals isn't there.

In this, organized criminal syndicates are central. The same existing networks used to traffic people, drugs, weapons, and stolen goods are perfect for moving endangered animals (alive or dead) or illegal timber—globally the illegal wildlife trade is worth $10-20 billion annually, about 13% of the legal trade and the second-largest global black market after drugs.

Without Rich World's Demand, There's Less Incentive For Poor to Poach or Criminals to Smuggle
A quick survey of the TreeHugger and Planet Green archives, searching for stats on levels of resource consumption and the differing ecological footprints of nations, reveals that it is not people in poverty that are the real problem when it comes to pushing the planet beyond its means to sustainably regenerate natural resources or absorb greenhouse gas emissions, it is the wealthy nations of the world—which means those places where readers of this site live, by and large

Duffy says that same imbalance and skewed perspective is true with the illegal wildlife trade. Even though Interpol and similar international organizations know about the connections between global organized crime, they are more likely to point the finger at the poor.

[These organizations] continue to tell us that people poach and smuggle because they are poor, reinforcing the stereotype that local people are the problem and that poverty drives wildlife to extinction. [...] By highlighting how global consumer culture connects all us to the wildlife trade and organized crime, conservation organizations could make similar gains [to those seen in the collapsing ivory trade in Europe and North America in the 1980s].

Tropical Deforestation Also Driven By Rich Nation's Demand More Than Poor's Survival
Tangentially, a similarly skewed picture of deforestation—albeit one which is being straightened—exists with the causes of tropical deforestation. While it is true that twenty years ago one of the main causes of deforestation was small-scale subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture and other encroachment by farmers, since the 1990s it has been large scale corporate agriculture that is responsible for most deforestation. Without increasing demand from the wealthy, keeping in mind we're talking commodity crops here like soybeans and palm oil, plus greater levels of meat eating expanding cattle ranches, this dynamic changes.

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More on Organized Crime & The Environment:
Illegal Ivory Trade on the Rise as Organized Crime Syndicates in Africa, Asia Growth in Strength
UN Forest Protection Scheme Open for Organized Crime Abuse
Malaysia Indigenous People Paid by Poaching Syndicates to Kill Tigers
Gangsters Go Green! Mafia Tied to Fraudulent Italian Wind Farms - Madagascar 'Timber Mafia' Thriving
The Italian Mafia is Making Money with Wind Power
Illegal Logging by Pakistan's Timber Mafia Increased Flooding Devastation