At the beginning of last year, the conservationist community were encouraged to read of signs that the trade in illegal wildlife organic matter was on the decrease. Both the number of ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scale seizures and the total weight of the organic matter confiscated had dropped over 2020.
According to the National Geographic’s online journal, 2020’s tally of 466 seizures marks a drop from the 2015-2019 average of 530 seizures per year. These tallies, generated by the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies, are comprised of incidents recorded by local media and customs officials.
It must be said that seizure statistics are not considered an inarguable metric for the traffic of illegal wildlife matter. However, confiscated items do give a rough idea of the overall trade in these substances. And, when 2020’s results were in, they made for encouraging reading for those concerned with conservation and ending the illegal trade in wildlife parts.
It was especially encouraging considering that the signs pointed toward a general uptick prior to 2020. In 2019, 964 seizures of illicit wildlife substances were recorded globally. Unsurprisingly, the dip, it has been suggested, was the result of travel restrictions imposed by the emergence of COVID-19.
Analysts for the Centre for Advanced Defence Studies (C4ADS) posited that the pandemic hampered wildlife traffickers ability to move their products. However, C4ADS, a U.S. not-for-profit organisation that analyses cross-border security issues, also suggested that the pandemic impacted authorities ability to track and enforce against the trade in wildlife parts.
The pandemic: how it impacted the trade in illegal animal parts, how it highlighted what little oversight we have on it, and whether a boom is still coming
Each of the three above-identified animal parts are frequently trafficked out of Africa. Much of these commodified body parts are sold in the east. Pangolin scales and rhino horn are used frequently as ingredients in folk medicine, most predominately in China and Vietnam. And, of course, elephant ivory traffics widely and is used most predominately for precious carvings worn as a status symbol.
According to investigators at the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC), the pandemic caused wildlife traders to stockpile their wares. It may also have resulted in experimentation with different modes of transporting these substances out of the African continent.
With such global disruption to security as well as travel, the faults of the seizure metric as a measure for the illegal trade in wildlife have just been further proven. We presently have no better illustration of the size of this industry as a whole but there have been, over the course of 2020, worrying indications that despite the amount of seizures dipping in 2020, poaching and trade did not follow this trend.
Online offerings for the sale of animal parts, for example, seemed to remain strong in 2020. Live cheetah are a good example of this particular element to illicit wildlife trade. They are often trafficked out of Africa for sale as pets in the Gulf states. What’s more, and this is something we at the Tsavo Trust witnessed first-hand, seizure data does not account for the increased instances of bushmeat poaching that the pandemic seemed to produce.
As the effects of the pandemic settled on our conservation jurisdiction, the Tsavo Conservation Area, we began to notice an uptick in snares and raiding parties. The cause for this was obvious, food insecurity and job losses drew people into wildlife protection areas in the search for sustenance.
These are very obvious causes for concern. The pandemic has highlighted conservation experts shortcomings in quelling the illegal trade in wildlife. It seems, also, to have promoted a massive stockpiling which, unrecorded as it is, gives us no indication as to the scale of poaching that is behind it.
These are worrying signs for those concerned with ending the trade in wildlife. Experts have never been so in the dark with regards to its scale and, to further the worry, we are unsure as to the new mechanisms for trade that they have developed while we’ve been out of the loop.