ENVIRONMENT: Wildlife Trade Becomes Organised Crime

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 17 2002 (IPS) - Mafia groups and drug cartels are moving into illegal trade in wildlife products, a new report reveals.

The report, ‘International Wildlife Trade and Organised Crime’, released Monday by the World Wildlife Foundation, WWF, in London says that organised criminal gangs – including the Russian mafia – are using existing smuggling routes for wildlife products, arms, drugs, and even for smuggling people.

An earlier report from the WWF had indicated that many wildlife smugglers were getting away with their crime because of lax laws. “The new report points to the people behind wildlife crimes,” Anthony Fields of the WWF told IPS.

These are not just some eccentric collectors,” he said. “We are starting to get organised criminals, and we are starting to get very serious business with serious players. We have to stamp this out before it gets any bigger,” he said.

The report says that half the wildlife criminals prosecuted in Britain last year have previous convictions for drugs, violence, theft and firearms offences. The WWF says the trend seen in Britain is likely to be a global pattern.

“There is strong evidence that this is reflected globally, as serious, often violent, organised crime groups get involved in the most lucrative areas of illegal wildlife trade such as caviar smuggling.”

The report says that “in Brazil, recent estimates suggest that up to 40 per cent of illegal drug shipments are combined with wildlife.” The United States Fish and Wildlife Service has reported that more than a third of cocaine seized in the U.S. in 1993 was associated with wildlife imports.

In the same year a U.S. Customs inspector in Miami noticed an unnatural bulge in a live boa constrictor which was part of a shipment of 312 animals from Colombia. An investigation revealed that cocaine-filled condoms had been forcibly inserted into 225 of the snakes. A total of 39 kilograms of cocaine was recovered from the reptiles, all of which died.

An example of the kind of mafia behind the smuggling of wildlife products is Russian mafia gangs behind caviar smuggling, the report says. These gangs are heavily armed and have boats faster than any of those belonging to the Russian authorities. These gangs extract caviar from Sturgeon fish and sell it to Western markets at a very high price.

Stuart Chapman, head of the species programme at WWF, said Monday: “This report confirms what many have suspected. The huge profits that can be made from wildlife trafficking are acting as a magnet to organised crime networks. The profits, sometimes worth up to 800 per cent, combined with the low risks of detection and lack of serious punishment make illegal wildlife trade very attractive to criminals.”

The study identifies three actions needed to combat organised, illegal wildlife trade in Britain: identify illicit markets; identify people and networks within the criminal organisations, and hinder criminals by creating stronger legislation, enhanced enforcement and closing legal loopholes.

The British government set up a National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit in April. This unit has been asked to gather information on markets, criminals and networks.

But Crawford Allan, global enforcement co-ordinator for TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network that worked jointly with the WWF on the report says; “we believe the main problems in the UK are a lack of investment in wildlife law enforcement and the minimal punishments under wildlife trade laws that do not act as a deterrent to criminals.”

The report highlights four clear links between illegal wildlife trade and organised crime:

– The use of legal shipments of wildlife to conceal drugs. At Heathrow, in 1996, while inspecting a consignment of live snails, customs officers discovered that they were packed with heroin.

– Enforcers in several countries have reported the use of venomous snakes by criminals to guard or conceal drug caches and consignments.

– The parallel trafficking of drugs and wildlife along shared smuggling routes. In Latin America, powerful drug cartels operate in the countries where many endangered species live and use their covert distribution networks to trade in these species as well as drugs. The money from drug dealing is also laundered by setting up trading businesses such as illegal logging operations.

– Wildlife products are used as a currency to ‘barter’ for drugs, and to launder drug traffic money. For example, smuggled birds from Australia have been exchanged for heroin in Bangkok, with the drugs being flown back to Australia for sale.

According to the report, most global trade in wildlife is legal but “wherever trading is regulated by bans and prohibitions to conserve species, there will also be opportunities for a lucrative illegal trade.”

The report says different categories have their own methods, markets, routes and ‘tricks of the trade’ which include concealment, misdeclaration, permit fraud and the laundering of proceeds through complex re-exports.

The global trade in animals, plants and their by-products has been estimated at 159 billion dollars a year based on declared import values. But the extent of illegal trade is “notoriously difficult to estimate,” the report says.