I'm hoping I can pull off an expedition to Kunming and Xishuangbanna (Yunnan) in Late July. Currently the paper work has all been submitted. This time round, part of the trip will be pertaining to poaching and smuggling of wildlife. In this case, the focus is back on tigers. Yunnan borders several SE Asian range states for tigers and has a history of being a transit point or destination for tiger parts.
I think one of the problems with wildlife poaching is that its traditionally been seen as a conservation (i.e. biology) problem. One of the key things we need to grasp is that black markets for wildlife also have a strong economic dimension. People aren't poaching tigers and leopards because they're bad people. They're not doing it because they're misinformed. They're doing it because crime pays. Wildlife poaching is an economic activity that is profitable to its participants.
Sundarban Tiger – Source: Shutterstock 
Poachers hunt animals because it works for them. They may have particular skill sets and knowledge that makes them adept at hunting. And the risks aren't off-putting. The frequency with which big-cat poachers get caught and prosecuted isn't high. Likewise smugglers are doing it for similar reasons. They're adept at transporting contraband over big distances and international borders.
So, we do need to understand how these criminal organisation operate at the economic level. How is they source their products, locate their customers and organise its distribution? What are the risk-reducing strategies they adopt? What is it that is driving the demand for tiger parts and the like? There are a lot of suggestions that seem reasonable, that also don't withstand a lot of scrutiny. It's been suggested that rich Chinese businessmen are the main customers for tiger skins. Well, with perhaps 300 tigers a year being poached, we can be pretty certain that the vast majority of rich businessmen aren't buying tiger skins. As a trait of the average consumer of tiger parts, this needs a lot of refinement.
Posts Tagged poaching
Back to tigers? Waiting on the paper work Jun 19
No CommentsIt’s a publication! May 22
5 CommentsThis morning started with the pleasant news my paper on American alligator conservation has been accepted for publication. This was actually a look at the interplay between alligator farming and hunting, and the conservation flow-on effects of these.
There's basically two camps on the issue of wildlife farming. One is that wildlife farming can help conservation. One proposed reason is that farming increases supply, reduces prices and deters poaching. So not surprisingly, it often mooted as a policy to employ if poaching is a major conservation problem.
The other camp argues that it is a measure that exacerbates extinction risks. Legal trade provides a potential vehicle for laundering. Some also worry that any stigma associated with consumption by bans, will end and demand rise. The last point is a little tricky, because stigma effects are a little difficult to identify and measure. And it's also often asserted it can't possibly work because shooting wildlife in the actual wild, is much cheaper than raising than on a farm or ranch.
Anyway, the whole point about alligators, is that it is a conservation success story, poaching has not resumed but has collapsed, and it is a rare empirical case where farming and hunting coexist. Instead of having to come up with various theoretical models, we can actually look at what happens.
The basic message is that we tend to be far too pessimistic about the ability of wildlife farming to contribute to conservation. None of the issues identified in the arguments above hold. Prices haven't collapsed despite massive increases in output, while poaching has for all practical purposes disappeared.
There are some good reasons why. Most of the positive conservation effects are felt through the non-price paths. Leather-manufacturers switched to legal skins because of volume and quality reasons. Consumers switched to legal products out of 'green' motives. And some of the reasons for pessimism didn't hold. Pessimistic theoretical models tend to assume the wildlife is open-access. This is an extreme case, which is known to lead to over-harvest. It lead to the almost complete extinction of bison in America, moas in NZ by early Polynesians and also, the collapse of several species of whales in the 20th century. It shouldn't come as a surprise, that if your model includes an open access condition, you'll get a decline in wildlife. That's going to hold under a variety of conservation policies. It practically makes the assumption of farming redundant. And no, it didn't actually apply in the case of alligators.
Of course, this isn't arguing that wildlife farming is a general solution to conservation problems. But there could well be more cases where it could support conservation, it we weren't quite as pessimistic about its chances.
Can the surge in elephant killing be stopped? Apr 24
3 CommentsThe CITES meeting in Bangkok (March 2013) highlighted once more the wavering fortunes of wild elephants. We are forced to recognise that poaching has been on a steady increase for over a decade, and that all steps to prevent this so far has failed.
At the policy level, the conflict remains one of whether a strict international ban on the trade in tusks will succeed, or whether a regulated trade will work instead. The skepticism about the international ban approach (which dates back to the 1989 CITE meeting) stems from several factors. These include the failure of the ban and accompanying education campaigns to reduce demand in foreign markets (which are to be honest, not exclusively Asian).
Source: Stock.Xchng
To move the debate on a bit, I'd like to reproduce an argument Michael Eustace made in a letter to the Business Day
DEAR SIR, The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned trade in ivory in 1989 but that has not stopped elephant poaching. There are many different estimates as to how many elephant are poached each year but 20,000 would seem a reasonable assumption. Most of the ivory of about 200 tons is sold to Chinese buyers with criminals making all the profit. The wildlife donor agencies persist in promoting increased law enforcement and changing the Chinese mindset as being the solution but neither is working as is evidenced by the ongoing poaching. Law enforcement in a corrupt society is ineffective and changing the Chinese mindset has been tried over many years and proved futile. China wants ivory and Africa has ivory. Both would prefer a legal trade rather than a criminal trade. Africa can sell the ivory that is gathered from natural deaths to China so as to satisfy some of the demand. There are about 500,000 elephant in Africa and some 10,000 die each year of natural causes. They leave 100 tons of ivory. That ivory could be sold by a broker, with a monopoly over all legal supplies of ivory, to a Chinese cartel of ivory carvers who could then sell to licensed retailers. That would establish a clear legal pipeline and China, as part of the deal, could undertake to close down the illegal trade and also confiscate stocks from speculators. With the price of ivory having risen strongly in recent years, speculation is likely to have been a significant part of overall demand. Some poaching will continue but it will be a lot less and a legal trade will save the lives of at least 10,000 elephants every year. In addition there would be $100 million in profits each year for Africa’s parks rather than international criminals.
This neatly encapsulates some of the frustration some conservationists have with the ban. It is the bans failure that motivates the rethink of the strategy. The basic weakness as I see it, is the ban was implemented to frustrate the illegal market of the 1980s. Expecting it to still work in the 2000s depends on the black-market not having changed- that the criminal conspiracies have not worked out means to circumvent it. The problem is the black market has changed. It is no longer hidden within the legal market. It operates with independent smuggling and sale into an underground market (at least, within China the unregistered factories and shops serve this function).
There is also a lot of elephants in Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where the 500,000 mentioned above comes from. 
Source: www.grida.no; Author: Riccardo Pravettoni, GRID-Arendal
We are in a position where natural deaths could supply a lot of demand in China. To put things into perspective, the one-off sale in 2008 to China of ivory, was an export of 62 tonnes- which they are eeking out by releasing 4-5 tonnes a year. As the letter above notes, we can actually supply a lot more than that, every year.
At the moment, the Chinese legal trade is really, just too small-scale to be impacting on the illegal trade. If we are serious about reducing poaching then this trade will have to increase in volume to crowd out the illegal market.
Radio Interview done, some musings Mar 30
No CommentsWell, back from my radio interview with Kim Hill. As I expected, we kind of hit the laundering issue surrounding elephants a lot. I think the laundering issue (one where poached tusks are passed off as legal, in the legal market) is exaggerated. One of the reasons is that in China for instance, the legal market (of registered sellers) and illegal (of unregistered) has split apart. The other is we do have examples of other wildlife markets where monitoring and regulating the legal trade has been proof against laundering. In many ways, there seems to be a drive to fight the black market of the 2010s, using the tactics of the late 1980s.
I think there is another element to this debate. While the risk of laundering is something we should be concerned about if there is a regulated trade, it doesn't mean the total ban is free of risks. By persisting with a total ban, we keep alive a number of threats to elephants. Chiefly, by reducing competition to smugglers, we keep ivory prices high and maintain their pool of buyers. This isn't working out so well. Poaching has been on the rise for over a decade. It hasn't abated. The black market today isn't the same as the one of the 1980s.
The other point is really, there's no such thing as one elephant population in Africa. The distribution is heavily weighted towards the Southern African region.
Source: www.grida.no; Author: Riccardo Pravettoni, GRID-Arendal
Most of the loss of elephants has been in West and Central Africa of the Forest African elephant. Populations there are also smaller and more fragmented. Perhaps more importantly however, is that these are the regions where there is a high degree of political chaos. The main driver for poaching in Africa may well be instability in some key states, rather than demand in Asian countries. The populations of savannah elephants in Southern and East Africa have been growing or stable.
Looking the wrong way: legal ivory market not linked to illegal Feb 12
No CommentsThis piece has already appeared on the NZ Herald Opinion page.
My main concern here is to highlight that the legal market appears to be pretty well insulated from the illegal.
—–
I visited China for a research project on the ivory trade in January. It took two years of groundwork first. China is not an easy place to get data from – you just can’t drop in and start investigating.
And, rather than gathering rumours and stories from the fringes of the legal market, which seems to be the case in many international media reports, my colleague and I got access to other parts of the supply chain. The evidence began pointing away from the legal market as a catalyst for the illegal trade of ivory.
Ivory Carving- Southern Style. The butterflies are also carved from ivory.
I’m a wildlife economist, but first a conservationist. Like all conservationists, I’m extremely concerned at the rate at which elephants are being poached in Africa, but it concerns me when I see inaccurate stories. You can’t fight the black market trade in wildlife unless you understand how it operates – and the legal ivory trade is not the right place to focus conservation efforts.
In a major ivory factory in Beijing, we looked at the workstations. There were 16 in all. In 1990, before the CITES ban on international ivory sales, the factory had 800 staff, but the ban decimated the legal ivory carving industry in China.
China legally purchased 62 tonnes from the existing ivory stockpile in 2008, and by that year there were only eight staff and one master carver left. Staff levels have since expanded to 16. Most were technicians in their third year of training. Depending on their complexity, pieces would take anywhere between two months and two years to complete.
By weight, about 90 per cent of the registered ivory is made into unique pieces with specific photo-IDs. The scope of the problem of resale of small generic pieces is unknown, but the legal trade is simply unable to absorb the tonnes of ivory being smuggled from Africa. The registration system tracks raw ivory through to the final product and cross-checks each stage for weight gains. Factories and shops are inspected regularly and sometimes covertly, several times a year.
Ivory prices depend on many variables, such as size and grade, the quality of the carving and the reputation of the carver. It’s impossible to detect claimed dramatic price rises for ivory. Prices are what we describe as very noisy. None of the suppliers we interviewed expect overall prices to rise. Other goods, like jade, are preferred for investment over ivory as they’re showing attractive price increases.
The legal ivory system in China is a small industry, with a productive output strongly limited by the lack of qualified carvers. It’s subject to monitoring and inspections that make laundering risky. It’s not a competitive market, as entry is restricted and firm numbers are low. This suits the incumbent firms as it inflates their prices and their profits.
They have no enthusiasm to expand output as this would cause prices to drop. The small size of the industry and the slow output cycle means they cannot absorb large volumes of ivory.
The legal market caters to a clientele of informed, repeat customers after quality pieces, which distinguishes it from the illegal market where we saw generally cruder and smaller carvings which could be pumped out by less skilled carvers, items of less value to serious collectors.
The ivory sale to China in 2008 put money back into elephant conservation in the four southern African countries. On-going trade may be sustained by natural deaths and culls in Africa. The legal market is insulated from the illegal market at several levels. Blaming the legal trade for elephant poaching is simplistic, wrong and a threat to the conservation gains the industry has yielded. It is also a perverse distraction because we need to focus on the real causes of poaching.
Ten Years On: The Elephant Ivory Problem Jan 14
1 CommentIn 2003 the chapter I wrote on wildlife trade[1] mentioned the illegal ivory market a few times. This was in the wider context of the conservation effects of bans. The chapter was based on a 2001 meeting in Cambridge University in September. I was unable to attend this meeting because, well, the 9/11 terrorist attacks stopped a lot of international flights at the time.
The (commercial) international trade in ivory was effectively banned at the 1989 Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species (CITES) meeting. Elephants were listed on Appendix I instead of Appendix II. An Appendix I listing does not permit commercial trade in the wildlife or their parts. It has no implications for domestic trade however. An Appendix II listing allows a regulated trade under a system of permits (and sometimes quotas).
There have been two one-off sales of stockpiled ivory to China and Japan since then. The demand for ivory products has not as far as we can tell, waned in these Asian markets. Rising incomes in China are if anything, leading to an increase in demand. The one-off sales are intended to reward those African countries with well-managed elephant populations. If you have elephants, then you accumulate tusks (from natural mortality, culls etc). The better you are at conserving elephants, the more there is, and the more tusks you accumulate. Cashing in those tusks can be a way to support this conservation. It’s also contentious. Many conservationists continue to support a tough, ban-the-trade strategy.
From the book chapter ten years ago:
The rationale for the ban was straightforward. The legal trade in ivory was providing poachers with a means of smuggling ivory into final markets in Europe, North America and Asia. Authorities and consumers were unable to distinguish poached ivory from legally obtained ivory. This gave poachers the least-cost way to market their product in overseas markets. Hence if the legal trade was sacrificed, poachers would not have this smuggling route available. The sacrifice did, however, give elephant populations a chance to recover p48
This is a view I share with some other conservationists. The 1989 ivory-ban was a temporary measure. It was going to buy time for elephants. That time could be used to implement better trade and management. Or we could blow the opportunity and let smugglers develop counter-measures.
Faced with a sudden rise in distribution costs, smugglers patiently developed alternative routes that were independent of the legal traffic. Instead of simply waiting and hoping for the ban in ivory to be lifted, new routes and new markets were developed p49-50
In a not very prescient observation, I noted that shipping containers were starting to be used to smuggle poached ivory. In December last year a shipment of 24 tonnes[2] was found in two such containers by Malaysian customs. Shipping containers are being interdicted that have ivory concealed in them. This is probably a function of the bulky nature of tusks. You need some way of moving a lot to make it economic.
Anyway, this is what we have seen happen. New routes have developed. New markets, especially in South East Asia and China have grown.
…Simple policy measures may work for a time but they end up being circumvented. Regulations rearrange costs and have flow-through effects to final markets. These market spill-overs spur participants to circumvent these costs …
The poaching crisis for elephants is now recognised to be as extreme as the 1980s.
I don't think my book chapter was very wide off the mark.
—-
[1] Moyle, B. (2003). Regulation, conservation and incentives. In Oldfield, S. (ed). The Trade in Wildlife: Regulation for Conservation, Earthscan Publications Ltd., London & Sterling, VA. Pp. 41-51.
[2] This news item also employs the popular and erroneous urban myth that the trade in wildlife is about Traditional Chinese Medicines.
How to write a news report on Wildlife Poaching Nov 07
No CommentsAfter reading many of these over the years, I believe I have discerned the formula for writing the successful news report on wildlife poaching. This is all that it takes:
1) Always support the trade-ban. Trade bans are always the right thing to do. They are a brilliant conservation strategy that creates much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the actual black-markets. Removing legal competition, inflating prices and creating a niche for organised crime always discourages poaching. Because everyone knows that bloating the profits of crime syndicates through a ban, is the last thing these guys want. Rhinos have been subject to an international trade-ban since 1977. Don't question its effectiveness. Making criminals rich has got to deter poaching eventually.
2) Tantalise and shock the reader. Everyone needs to be told that wildlife is poached for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). And TCM is only ever used for one thing of course- aphrodisiacs. Readers love being told this stuff. On no account should you actually tell the readers that wildlife is poached for a myriad of reasons and it is almost always, has nothing to do with aphrodisiacs.
3) Call for more law enforcement. Obviously nobody has since say, 1977 for rhinos, ever thought of this before. The shoot-to-kill policy adopted towards some poachers in African states is just us being soft towards poaching. What we need to do is 'more'. Whatever that means.
4) Call for more education. Anti-consumption 'education' campaigns have been running in many Asian countries since the 1990s. We're not entirely sure where the consumers are or what their motives are, so broach-brush approaches are being used. Because nothing kills off demand faster than the constant reminder to people that the wildlife products have medicinal properties in their culture.
5) Make proposals to reduce value of the wildlife. For example, dehorning rhinos was started in the late 1980s as a way to discourage poachers. With barely any horn left, poachers would have little desire to hunt the rhinos. We've been waiting for this to work for two decades of course.
6) Mock anyone who expresses doubt. The trade-ban is the corner-stone of a brilliant conservation strategy. The collapse of rhino numbers due to poaching, the extinction of the Western Black subspecies, the loss of all wild rhinos in Vietnam- are all utterly minor setbacks. Anyone who wonders if we should be considering legal trade isn't a "true" conservationist. They're in the pay of the Chinese or the hunting fraternity or something. The trade-ban is brilliant so there's nothing to debate. We just need to spend more money on doing what's been failing for over 30 years.
(Sorry, I'm in a slightly dark mood)
Mapping tiger smuggling Nov 05
No CommentsOne of the first problems I ran into with researching tiger smuggling was the bias. A lot of the studies had been done by organisations based in India. Imaginative and creative arrows were being drawn across India, Nepal, into Tibet and over into the eastern provinces of China. The two big gaps were interdiction rates inside China, and the case of the Indo-Chinese tiger.
At the last SCB meeting I gave a paper on the breakdown of interdictions inside China. This data was obtained after some patient relationship building within China. The basic breakdown is as follows:
Figure 1: Smuggling Map 1999-2010
Province in coloured as deep-red are hotspots. These are provinces that have had multiple cases of smugglers being intercepted. The obvious characteristic is each is a province that borders range states with wild tiger populations.
Provinces in pale-red are low-interdiction cases. These are province that have had one arrest only.
The map also is instructive as it gives some idea of the scope of the international borders smugglers can take advantage of. It should come as no surprise that parts also show geographical trends also. Amur tigers are intercepted in the north (Heilong-Jiang/Jilin), Indo-Chinese & Bengali in the south (Yunnan), and Bengali in the west (Tibet).
Smuggler caught with 16 Tiger Cubs Oct 29
No CommentsA colleague drew my attention to this story out of Thailand
BBC-News Thailand
The story is principally about a truck-driver, paid to smuggle 16 tiger cubs from Thailand into Laos. The driver was caught when he attempted to avoid a police checkpoint. With 16 cubs, it is practically certain these same from a 'breeding facility' within Thailand. Tigers can produce 4 cubs in a litter but less is also common. Getting 16 cubs from the wild within Thailand would involve a very serious effort in search, risks of mortality in transporting cubs out of the wild, and risks of being caught within the reserves. It would be much easier and less risky to get the cubs from a captive source. Such animals would also be more familiar with people and hence, more sedate to transport.
The interception is indicative of two enforcement issues. First, crossing borders is the riskiest aspect of the illegal supply chain. From an economic perspective, the 'black-market firm' is better placed to pass this risk on to people who are willing to bear it at a lower price. The driver said he'd been paid 15,000 baht ($US 490 or £300) for the job. The second is that the size of the shipment (16 live animals) shows that enforcement agencies are being ineffective. A good sign that enforcement is effective is reductions in shipment size. This is the easiest thing for smugglers to do to reduce their risks. It does inflate their other costs (fewer units transported each trip drives up the average costs). So, the fact they are making large shipments here mean that they have little to worry about from law enforcement.
The story implies that the cubs are being smuggled for parts for traditional medicines. This seems unlikely. It would be much easier to kill the tigers within Thailand and transport the parts in a more cryptic way. This would also mean the smugglers did not have live animals to care for and feed for the duration of the trip. I suspect the most likely explanation is that this is the nucleus for a 'tiger farm' within Laos. Thailand and Vietnam are known to have breeding of tigers occurring in 'commercial quantities'. This may now be a reflection of the attempt to do the same within Laos. With actual wild tiger numbers in Indo-China being critically low, captive sources of tigers are much easier to locate and transport.
This also means that the CITES resolutions that call upon certain range states to end such breeding is largely being ignored.
#Tiger woes Jul 04
No CommentsThe recent Stuff news article on the dwindling kea numbers brought up the comparison with the tiger. Keas (a native parrot) have dwindled and the keen conservationists trying to avert this, point out that they get a lot less money than tigers.
Kea
This isn't really a great revelation because, well, nothing gets more money than the tiger. And sadly, tiger conservation has been one of the most conspicuous conservation failures we have. With tigers we seem doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, largely because of the 'feel good' factor. We use reserves, trade bans and anti-poaching measures, but never try to understand how these black-markets work. Then when the policy fails- perhaps because there are all kinds of perverse effects that make these bans counter-productive- we just decide to do the same thing year after year, but with more money.
And every year, we have less and less tigers. So the blame game begins. Apparently if we decide to use a conservation strategy that makes tigers worth $US50,000 to Asian criminals, we shouldn't expect them to take advantage of it. When your basic conservation strategy to save tigers is to make Asian criminals rich if they push them to extinction, maybe we should be rethinking the whole logic being used here.