Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Security in Africa

Myths and Realities

Cathy Haenlein, M L R Smith, Cathy Haenlein, M L R Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351370806
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Biological Sciences

A worldwide surge in poaching and wildlife trafficking is threatening to decimate endangered species. This crisis also threatens the security of human beings in ways ignored until recently by decision-makers slow to begin to treat what is typically viewed as a 'conservation issue' as serious crime.

Over the past decade, as the scale and profitability of poaching and wildlife trafficking have grown, politicians, journalists and campaigners throughout the world have begun to take notice – they are offering striking appraisals of the threat posed not only to endangered species but also to human populations. Many of these appraisals, however, are made in the absence of a detailed body of empirical research and analysis to underpin them. The result is the growth of a range of myths and misperceptions around the security threats posed, particularly as they relate to Africa.

Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Security in Africa examines the most common narratives on poaching, wildlife trafficking and security. It critically analyses the dominant discourses on poaching and wildlife trafficking as threats to human security, as drivers of conflict, as funders of terrorism and as a focus for organised crime. In doing so, it seeks to sort myth from reality, to clarify how poaching and wildlife trafficking, as much cited threats to security, can most accurately be conceived. Such a study is crucial to the efforts of stakeholders now rightly looking to respond not just to the threat posed to endangered species, but also to the security and wellbeing of human beings.

IV. POACHING, WILDLIFE TRAFFICKING AND ORGANISED CRIME

TIM WITTIG

One of the most serious security threats posed by poaching and wildlife trafficking may also be one of the least well documented: their relationship with organised crime. This goes beyond rhetoric on ivory as a conflict resource, and concerns poaching and wildlife trafficking as part of an organised environmental crime industry now considered by some analysts as the largest globally after trafficking in drugs and humans, and counterfeit crimes.¹ National governments and the international community now recognise the problem not only in environmental terms, but also as a serious emerging form of transnational organised crime.² Indeed, established organised crime networks appear to be increasingly engaging in wildlife crime as a lucrative – and still relatively low-risk – activity, and many African countries are facing convergence between wildlife trafficking and other forms of crime.

This chapter examines the relationship between poaching, wildlife trafficking and organised crime. It argues that this security dimension may be of greater concern than the relatively small amounts of ivory acquired by conflict and terrorist actors, as examined in Chapters II and III (although, as noted in Chapter II, the two threats may intersect). The exact nature of the organised crime threat remains poorly and largely only anecdotally documented. As a result, it is probably understated in political and media discourse on the security impacts of poaching and wildlife trafficking compared with that posed by militant non-state armed actors.

To shed light on the subject, this chapter analyses the most common narratives on the link between poaching, wildlife trafficking and organised crime – and the security threat this link poses in African source and transit countries. The focus is predominantly on higher-level wildlife trafficking beyond the poaching stage. Here, the chapter argues that the dominant narratives frequently assert the fact of organised criminal involvement without going as far as they might to consider its security implications. The chapter goes on to highlight a number of obstacles to addressing these security dimensions. It does so emphasising the stumbling blocks posed by a lack of understanding of the precise dynamics of wildlife trafficking and its overlaps with other forms of organised crime.

Beyond a Conservation Issue

As noted earlier in this Whitehall Paper, until the second decade of the twenty-first century, poaching and wildlife trafficking were viewed primarily in conservation and regulatory terms, even during the elephant poaching crisis of the 1980s and the early years of the current crisis, which began in the mid-2000s. Indeed, the 1980s crisis, which saw poaching-driven declines in elephant populations in many African range states comparable to those witnessed today,³ was addressed primarily by a set of regulatory measures. These included a worldwide ban in 1989 on ivory trade that resulted in a collapse in the price of, and indeed the market for, ivory.⁴ These measures were accompanied in some countries by special, targeted and finite enforcement operations to encourage compliance. However, poaching and wildlife trafficking remained fundamentally technical issues for conservationists and national wildlife and forestry authorities, rather than issues of significance for national or international law enforcement.

This has changed. Today, wildlife trafficking in particular has come to be understood not only as endangering the world’s wildlife but also as an emerging organised crime threat, which warrants robust law enforcement interventions beyond established conservation and regulatory measures. The evolution of this understanding can be traced clearly through the legislation and policy instruments that have grown up in the last few years in response to wildlife trafficking. Increasingly, individual countries have sought to establish formally the status of wildlife trafficking as a serious form of transnational organised crime. The US, a leader in establishing robust institutional responses to wildlife trafficking, recognised the seriousness of the threat in 2013 when it established a Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking and issued a national strategy dedicated to combating such activity.⁵ This was a notable development; as recently as 2011, the US government highlighted drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, cybercrime and weapons trafficking as serious organised crimes in its Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime,⁶ but omitted wildlife trafficking. The US has since been joined by the UK and a number of other countries in establishing initiatives and funding mechanisms to support robust responses to the issue.⁷

Such measures at the national level mirror increased attention to wildlife trafficking as an issue of organised crime within specialised international organisations and conservation NGOs. Many of these have increasingly (re)focused their work to highlight, and respond to, the threat posed by organised wildlife trafficking.⁸ In 2010, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) secretariat joined with INTERPOL, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the World Bank, and the World Customs Organization (WCO) to form the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), a cooperative mechanism to build ‘long-term capacity among national agencies responsible for wildlife law enforcement, and to provide these authorities with the tools and services that they need to combat wildlife crime effectively’.⁹ Today, UNODC references nine separate UN resolutions, including two adopted by the Security Council, that provide it with international authority to combat wildlife trafficking.¹⁰

In April 2015, the UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, held in Doha, Qatar, issued a formal declaration establishing priorities for addressing various types and drivers of transnational organised crime. This statement represented one of the first instances of formal UN recognition of wildlife trafficking as a serious form of transnational organised crime. The Doha Declaration included a section committing the international community ‘To adopt effective measures to prevent and counter the serious problem of crimes that have an impact on the environment, such as trafficking in wildlife, including flora and fauna as protected by [CITES], timber and timber products and hazardous waste, as well as poaching’. They were called to do so ‘by strengthening legislation, international cooperation, capacity-building, criminal justice responses and law enforcement efforts aimed at, inter alia, dealing with transnational organized crime, corruption and money-laundering linked to such crimes’.¹¹

Following closely from the Doha Declaration, in July 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted its first-ever resolution on wildlife trafficking. The resolution recognises the status of ‘illicit trafficking in protected species of wild fauna and flora’ as ‘an increasingly sophisticated form of transnational organized crime’.¹² It calls on member states to ‘review and amend national legislation ... so that offences connected to the illegal wildlife trade are treated as predicate offences, as defined in the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, for the purposes of domestic money-laundering offences’.¹³ This followed on from World Wildlife Day 2015, themed ‘It’s time to get serious about wildlife crime’, and dedicated in large part to exploring responses to wildlife trafficking as transnational organised crime. At the event, UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov described wildlife trafficking as ‘a transnational organized crime generating billions of dollars’. He spoke of the issue as ‘an inter-generational crime’ capable of ‘permanently scar [ring] the world the loss of some of our most beautiful creatures’.¹⁴

A consensus has thus developed among national and international policymakers, the conservation community, researchers and law enforcement bodies that wildlife trafficking is increasingly driven by transnational organised crime networks, and in itself represents a significant emerging organised crime threat at both national and global levels. As observed, this represents a notable evolution from previous thinking, which saw both poaching and wildlife trafficking primarily treated in technical conservation and regulatory terms, and largely excluded from the wider academic literature on criminology and organised crime (until recently, as the scale and sophistication of wildlife trafficking has increasingly been recognised).¹⁵

This agreement on viewing and responding to wildlife trafficking as a form of organised crime is an important development, especially in policy and political terms. However, it must be noted that this new consensus exists largely on superficial levels. Indeed, despite widespread acknowledgement in political and media discourse of the fact of organised criminal involvement in wildlife trafficking, there are few coherent, agreed-upon narratives on the precise nature of the organised criminal dynamics involved. In other words, while there is widespread agreement that wildlife trafficking represents both a serious conservation issue and an organised crime threat, there is only very partial empirical understanding of the precise dynamics of the relationship between organised crime and wildlife trafficking. There is thus limited analytic grounding for practical and policy responses. Addressing these gaps is critical.

Where CITES Ends and Organised Crime Begins

In assessing the evidence underpinning the intersection between wildlife trafficking and organised crime, it is helpful to consider briefly the history of organised, unregulated taking of wildlife and trade in derived products for profit. While such trade has long represented a threat to wildlife conservation and species survival, it is important to remember that it is and has not always been criminal. A review of this history is crucial to any attempt to understand and ground the evidence available on today’s organised criminal wildlife trafficking. This relates to the fact that the link between wildlife trafficking and organised crime – or crime in general – is a relatively recent phenomenon, inextricably linked with national and international efforts to control and limit the legal trade in wildlife.

Until the conservation movement took root in North America and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a range of species were regularly – and perfectly legally – hunted to extinction for economic reasons. Some, like the famous dodo (Raphus cucullatus), died out due to unsustainable hunting for meat and ostensibly to protect human settlements and livestock.¹⁶ Others, in a direct antecedent to today’s crisis, were pushed to extinction by organised, uncontrolled (but not, at the time, criminal) commercial exploitation. The great ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Human Security
• II. Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Conflict
• III. Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Terrorism
• IV. Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Organised Crime
• Conclusions