In 2019, I attended CITES CoP18 in Geneva, two weeks of watching how decisions are made about which endangered and exotic species can be legally traded. During the mid-conference break, my colleagues and I took the 4-hour drive to Milan, to take a look at what was on sale in one of the top fashion destinations in the world. After seafood, fashion and furniture are the are the two biggest users of wild species.

The first thing we noted from Milan’s luxury retail sector was how difficult it was to pass a store that didn’t contain fur, exotic leathers or feathers.

Posing as a customer who wanted to take something ‘special’ back to Australia from her Italian holiday but thought it best to check if a permit was needed, “You know the documentation, CITES I think it is called?”, I was interested in the response.

The general statements were that all their leather/fur was sourced ethically from trusted suppliers, who followed all the guidelines, and that the importer met all Italian regulations and laws. At this point it must be said that Italy (and most of the EU) still uses that 1970s paper-based CITES permits, which is so easy to forge that illegal specimens can be effortlessly laundered into the legal supply chain.

Another common pattern of response was that the products were made from the by-product of the meat industry, as locals eat the meat. So, it came as no surprise to see research in the last couple of weeks discussing how farmed python can be used for food. The ‘Ethics Declaration’ at the end of the paper confirms, “[The] work was partly funded by an initiative working to better understand snakes used in the leather trade, which is itself partially funded by companies that use snake skins”. My experience in Milan confirmed there is nothing better for a luxury company’s sustainability PR machine than to say their leather is a by-product of food production.

This ‘news item’ was placed in many mainstream media outlets. In the echo chamber of media coverage very little was discussed about the lack of supply chain transparency. Thankfully, in one article, Lin Schwarzkopf, head of zoology and ecology at James Cook University, was quoted, “I would need to see more information about the supply chain before I thought it was a great idea.”

The use of snake skins for the commercial production of leather only started in the mid-1920s, but by 1990 a regional review of supply-side countries in Asia found that python populations in several countries had already declined. The 1990 report discussed that collecting pythons for the skin trade had adversely affected populations and speculated that pythons likely remained ‘reasonably abundant’ in more remote areas not subject to intense collection pressure. While the report admitted the population impact of harvesting skins could not be evaluated in detail, it did highlight some of the key loopholes in the monitoring system that could be exploited, and finished by saying a levy system should be investigated because there was evidence that the true value of skins was ‘substantially under-declared’.

Let’s step forward 30 years and sadly all the same problems remain, even though report-after-report repeated the conclusions of the 1990 research.

But it isn’t quite true that nothing has changed. In the intervening 30 years the world had seen mass deforestation, including in those countries that supply the python skin trade. Luxury companies changed their business model of exclusivity and there has been marketing driven growth in the number of people who desire luxury products, capturing new customers with the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and changing conditions in China and SE Asia.

And we have had a technology revolution that could have easily solved the supply chain monitoring and transparency problems, but this technological development has been ignored by the companies profiting from and the regulators monitoring the legal trade in endangered species.

Luxury companies make billions from python skin products, yet for two decades they have been unwilling to invest the few million dollars needed to take the first step to fix the supply chain for CITES listed species, which includes pythons.

A 2013 article in The Ecologist: What Price That Snakeskin Handbag? states, “The European fashion industry accounts for 96% of the python skin market, with the main importers being Italy, France and Spain. The leading manufacturers and retailers of python skins are the designer brands Hermes, Gucci and Prada….It is a highly profitable trade, with the value of the python skin market estimated to be over £625 million (US$1 billion).”

At CITES 16th Conference of the Parties (CoP16; Bangkok 2013), concerns were raised by several CITES signatory countries regarding the conservation impacts of trade on wild snake populations and the need for greater monitoring and transparency.

In November 2013, the Python Conservation Partnership was established; a collaboration between Kering, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the Boa and Python Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The objective of the collaboration was to improve sustainability of the python skin trade, conduct research and make recommendations to improve sustainability and transparency amongst other things.  In 2014 this group published a report Assessment of Python Breeding Farms Supplying the International High-end Leather Industry.

While the report concludes that commercial farming of pythons for their skins ‘appears’ to be biologically and economically feasible, it acknowledges that absence of strong regulatory measures, monitoring and enforcement means captive breeding farms for pythons can be used to launder illegally collected or traded animals and skins, giving examples such as:

  • Despite large exports of python skins from Lao PDR with a CITES source code C [captively bred], this study found no evidence that python farming is currently taking place [in the country].”, and
  • “Python skin exports using a CITES source code “C” from countries other than China, Thailand and Viet Nam (e.g., Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos PDR and Malaysia) should be treated with caution until improved data on farms, management and monitoring systems are in place to verify captive production capacities.

There is certainly reason for concern about the scale of illegal poaching of pythons. In 2016, Chinese authorities recovered a massive haul of 68,000 smuggled python skins worth $48 million which was described as the “largest-ever python skin smuggling case.”

The same images are used in the media coverage of the research encouraging people to eat snakes are found in the 2014 report, so it comes as no surprise that they are authored by the same person.

Possibly, as a result of the easy of laundering alluded to in the 2014 report, in 2017 Kering announced it was setting up a python farm in Thailand. In a 2017 Guardian article Kering states its farm would begin producing adult skins in 2018, with provision of “a significant number” expected by 2020. Kering [also] said it did not expect to stop sourcing skins from the wild.

Falling Out Of Fashion

But the move to pythons as food isn’t only because the luxury fashion industry is desperately trying to bolster its sustainability credentials. The desire for python skin as a ‘raw materials’ for the fashion industry peaked, even before the pandemic. Then add the fact that the post-pandemic luxury boom has died down.

In the last week Kering has issued a profit warning. Their shares tumbled as much as 14% on March 20 —the largest drop in more than three decades. The warning triggered because expected sales at Gucci, Kering’s biggest brand, may be down 20% year-on-year in the first quarter.

What have been the trends in the exports of farmed pythons (Burmese and Reticulated) from Viet Nam and Thailand since 2013, when concerns were raised at CITES CoP16 about wild snake populations?

*Burmese Python Skins Exported From Viet Nam:
Peak export year was 2017: 158,210
By 2019 (before the pandemic): 109,971
By 2022 (last year of CITES reporting): 69,542

*Burmese Python Skins Exported From Thailand:
Peak export year was 2016: 7,818
By 2019: 104
By 2021 (last year of CITES reporting): 1,050

*Reticulated Python Skins Exported From Viet Nam:
Peak export year was 2014: 85,996
By 2019: 16,320
By 2021 (last year of CITES reporting): 3,001

*Reticulated Python Skins Exported From Thailand:
Peak export year was 2019: 2,202
By 2021, (last year of CITES reporting): 1,200

*Data obtained from the CITES TradeView Website

As the fashion industry was being advised to open its own python breeding facilities, the demand was already on a downward trend. The more relaxed ‘look’ of the post pandemic era has just accelerated this collapse. But other factors are also involved, such as customers losing trust in companies because they have ignored the growth of superfakes.  What else has happened?   

Five Freedoms

Sadly, the use of exotic and endangered species by the fashion industry falls into no man’s land between vegan fashion and pro-wildlife trade but one area where there is some overlap is animal welfare.

In recent years, a growing number of fashion weeks have started to consider the Five Freedoms (Freedom from Hunger and Thirst, Freedom from Discomfort and Pain, Freedom from Injury or Disease, Freedom to Express Normal Behaviour, Freedom from Fear and Distress) of animal welfare as a part of their guidelines for the designers they promote.

It is evident from videos of python farms that there is little opportunity for these animals to ‘express normal behaviour’. And as exposés, from the likes of PETA, show that freedom from pain, injury, fear and distress is clearly not happening in python farming as practised today.

Have the supply chain problems, animal welfare issues and lack of real proof of sustainability caused not only customers but also some luxury fashion brands to back-flip on their use of exotic leather in recent years?

For example, in 2017, Burberry joined a number of other companies to lobby the US government to remove business and brand names from Freedom Of Information Act requests associated with the confiscation of seized wildlife products. This was the result of research showing that between 2003 and 2013, luxury fashion brands had thousands of exotic leather goods seized by U.S. law enforcement. Nearly 70 percent of which were exotic leather products, reptiles accounted for 84 percent of all items, many of which were belts, watch bands, wallets, shoes, and purses.

While this research hasn’t resulted in the modernisation of the CITES trade permit system, in 2022 Burberry joined a growing number of companies confirming they would no longer use exotic leathers in future collections.

What Now For Python Farms?

After pro-sustainable use and livelihoods conservationists staked their reputations on the benefits of captive breeding of pythons, the bottom has dropped out of the market. Companies are overstocked with pythons the fashion industry doesn’t want. As with any industry they will try to diversify and find alternative trade channels.

While eating snake meat may not be as damaging to the planet as the problems associated with industrial beef production, this is a very narrow justification for keeping a failed experiment of captive breeding of pythons.

The narrow justification of the research (pythons v cattle) ignores:

The legal trade in wild species is a mess and driving biodiversity loss. It is the piecemeal, ad-hoc, siloed thinking shown in this python example – pythons v cattle – while ignoring all the other problems associated with the wildlife trade  – opaque supply chains, laundering, invasive species, ecosystem destruction – that means we have reached this point.

Are we going to walk blindfold into the same minefields by repeating the same patterns? So no, let’s not eat snake!