Iris Ho: Tackling the Illegal Wildlife Trade

Illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest wildlife-related issues in the world — particularly in Asia. Southeast Asia, all the way up to Hong Kong and China, is a huge hub of the illegal wildlife trade. And in addition to massive depletion of wildlife, the ecosystems and communities where the wildlife comes from are also affected.

November of last year in Denver, Colo., the U.S. government held a crush where about six tons of confiscated ivory was destroyed. And soon after, in January of 2014 in China, the Chinese government also destroyed a similar amount of confiscated ivory. Both crushes are significant in their own sense since China is the largest market of ivory and the U.S. is actually the second largest market for ivory. The governments of these two countries went ahead and destroyed a portion of their stockpiles of illegal ivory to demonstrate the urgency of the elephant-poaching crisis and also to highlight their commitment to combating illegal ivory trade.

About two weeks after China destroyed an ivory stockpile, we heard great news out of Hong Kong that they would also go ahead and destroy their stockpiles. And they have the largest amount of confiscated ivory to be destroyed. … Hong Kong is unique in the ivory trade because it’s not only a destination market for ivory, but it’s also a transit point.

As an organization, we disagree with those arguments. First of all, these are illegal goods. And illegal goods should never be released back to the market. Second, since these are illegal goods, destroying them is a way to send a message to consumers, poachers and traffickers that illegal ivory has no market value. Nobody should utilize these illegal goods and that’s why they should be destroyed.

The ivory crush was just one of the first steps to address this issue. It’s important to remember that China is a really big country with a number of different challenges, but we’ve seen a lot of encouraging developments related to wildlife recently. Take the shark fin issue for example. The Chinese government made an announcement recently that shark fins would not be served at government functions. And we’ve also seen an increased awareness of these issues among the Chinese public and more participation by the Chinese NGOs in reducing wildlife consumption and illegal wildlife trade. Together this paints a much more hopeful picture.

We did explore a potential national ban. And we were talking to lawmakers about that, but federal legislation can take much more time. Right now our focus is getting states to prohibit shark fin, while waiting until the political climate is right on the federal level. Then we will definitely be looking at those efforts as well.

There’s concern on Capitol Hill and also within our organization as well that a national ban could potentially increase the chances of a World Trade Organization challenge. Nobody wants to spend resources to battle a WTO case.

Any national ban would need to include restrictions on importation. And if you include that in the language of the bill, then it’s not something that the WTO welcomes when you block other countries’ products from entering to the U.S.

There’s really no overnight solution that can solve the poaching crisis, whether it’s rhino or elephant. There has to be a multi-front effort. It can’t be just addressing demand or addressing poaching in Africa. The crisis is so unprecedented and alarming. We really frankly have no actions other than addressing multiple areas of the problems. We have to address the poaching in Africa, we also have to address the trafficking network and send the consumer a message. So, multiple efforts have to be going on simultaneously.

In Africa, weak governance is one of the reasons why poaching is so rampant. A lot of resources have been dedicated to helping African countries end the poaching crisis. I hope that these new resources will make a difference on the ground.

In the meantime, we need to go after and prosecute the trafficking networks, find out who they are and then successfully prosecute with penalties that are strong deterrents. In the past that’s also been a problem — the penalty is so small compared to the profits that can be gained from poaching and trafficking. The penalty is not a deterrent at all. That’s why we’ve seen so many people who are willing to do this business.

Hopefully we can change the relevant laws on the ground and also increase enforcement networks to successfully prosecute these traffickers. And at the consumer’s end, continue education efforts lead by the Humane Society International and others.

Let me give you an example. Recently I got a text from our partner group in China who now wanted to start a campaign on pangolins…

It’s a small mammal and some Chinese people use their scales for medicine. Therefore it’s one of the most threatened wildlife in China.

Overnight this partner group was strategizing about how to protect the pangolin. When I woke up I had about 150 text messages from them. This illustrates to me that we have passionate people in China and in other places in Asia, too, that are as concerned about threats to wildlife and illegal wildlife trade as I am. So, the frequent interaction with these advocates and NGOs, that’s what gives me hope.