Having just returned from Washington DC and meetings with political representatives and advisors from both side of the aisle, what is evident is how little they know about the international commercial legal trade in wild species.
The pattern of the meetings was them bringing up elephants and rhinos, hunting trophies and zoos and poverty alleviation. This isn’t unique to the USA, we have found the same situation in meetings with political and trade representatives from Australia to Europe, Asia to Latin America.
But it begs the question, how have the government policy people in the global conservation organisations, who do have access to government, left political representatives so ignorant of the scale of this industrial commercial trade? They certainly have allowed big business to hide behind small scale cultural and community use of wild species. If we want to save wild species from overexploitation this political naivety must be addressed.
Together with Nature Needs More’s collaborative partner on this project, US based NGO Active for Animals, in every meeting we had to reframe the issue from iconic species and poverty alleviation to global scale commercial trade, and explain that after seafood, fashion and furniture were the key profiters from the trade in wild species and that the large businesses profiting from this trade were not contributing to the costs of regulation.
Now we know that hiding the corporate mode of exploitation is a tried and tested smokescreen by large corporations, and primary industries, to divert public attention from what is really happening. Industrialised agriculture and especially industrial animal farming has made this diversion into an art form. When under threat from new regulations, the industry waxes lyrically about the small, family farmers struggling to survive and stages media friendly protests with tractors blocking roads in countries worldwide.
The Dutch farmers’ protest of new laws introduced last year to limit nitrogen emissions is just the most recent example of using this strategy. Despite being a country of just 17.5 million people and just 180,000 farmers, the Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural produce. With a land area of just 48,000 km2 (smaller than West Virginia), it is obvious that only highly industrialised agriculture can achieve this sort of output.
The new laws threaten this very mode of production by limiting the number of livestock that can be kept in the country. Using the well-established playbook to protect their vested interests, big, media friendly, protests were staged and even a new political party was founded to ‘protect small farming families’.
What the protesters and those pulling the strings did not talk about is that Dutch farmers are not the poor, struggling farmers of the myth by any means, as farmers are second only to bankers in the top occupations of the country’s 317,000 millionaires.
The fishing industry also uses the exact same playbook when it comes to fighting reductions in quota or any attempt at actual monitoring of catch levels and compliance with fishing regulations. The media will be guided to the small boats and struggling fishermen that make up most of the boats but are largely irrelevant when it comes to catch levels and destructive practices. The EU is very helpful in providing a detailed breakdown of its fishing fleet from which we can learn that the total fleet comprised of 65,500 vessels in 2017, landing a total catch of 5.3million tonnes.
Of those vessels nearly 80% (49,500 vessels) comprise the small-scale coastal fleet, those proverbial ‘little’ boats from the news. Yet these small-scale vessels land only 8% of the total catch. The rest is big business and big boats. The media goes along with this, and it would seem it even extends to stock photography sites like iStockphoto and Shutterstock. When you search for photos of fishing trawlers on either site, you get small boats. It is like the massive trawlers that are up to 140m in length do not exist (or have been censored).
It should therefore come as no surprise that the proponents of the (evidently unsustainable) legal trade in wild species have adopted the same tactics in the last couple of decades. Using the plight of poor local communities in desperate need for ‘development’ and ‘diversification of livelihoods’, the international trade in exotic and endangered species gets conflated with ‘helping’ poor, struggling communities with economic development.
This is a smokescreen in very much the same vein as the agriculture and fishing examples mentioned. A great example of this is the trade in wild snowdrops (yes, snow drops are listed for CITES trade restriction) from Georgia. In Georgia, around 200 locals make US$120 each per year receiving US$1.60 per 1000 bulbs (let’s be clear this is 200 people out of Georgia’s total population of over 3.7 million), whereas the retail price in the Netherlands is US$1,140 per 1000 bulbs.
This strategy of pretending that the wildlife trade should be seen as a path to poverty alleviation in the Global South has also been adopted by a wide range of IGOs and even been supported by many conservation NGOs. This is unfortunate and probably a by-product of the crisis in the conservation sector. Nature Needs More is not opposed to the cultural and local trade in species. If properly managed as a ‘commons’, neither trade is linked to extinction risk. It is only the commercial domestic trade and the international trade that have been clearly linked to population decline.
Even the CITES convention itself has recently become a target to give this smokescreen more credence. CITES was designed to protect species from overexploitation from trade and making poverty alleviation of indigenous people and local communities (IPLC) a core topic of CITES was not on anyone’s high-priority list until very recently.
Nevertheless, now every Standing Committee meeting and Conference of the Parties has an agenda item called ‘Livelihoods’. A cynic might say that they are desperately trying to find something to justify their ongoing existence since CITES has failed in its stated objective of protecting endangered species from overexploitation through trade, with trade being the primary extinction driver for marine species and the second most important driver for terrestrial and freshwater species.
The latest push has been the attempt to give IPLC representatives a special status in CITES decision making processes. Yet the basis of CITES listings – non-detriment findings – are entirely the responsibility of national governments. If you wanted to include local and indigenous knowledge in the (supposedly) scientific decision-making process, you would urge national governments to do so.
As we discussed in detail in our 2021 Modernising CITES Report, the convention does have strong inequities baked into its design. The countries of the Global South carry most of the costs of implementing the convention but get no funding to do so. The vast majority of the profits from the trade goes to large corporations in the Global North.
The notion that CITES should somehow ‘take care’ of local communities is plainly ridiculous for a convention based on national sovereignty and private property rights over nature. The CITES Standing Committee meeting was held last week in Geneva and I was struck by a LinkedIn post quoting a 37-year veteran of CITES reminding the bright eyed, optimistic new generation of conservationists coming through the system that the very first sentence of the CITES convention is, “Recognizing that wild fauna and flora in their many beautiful and varied forms are an irreplaceable part of the natural systems of the earth which must be protected for this and the generations to come”. To anyone not steeped in CITES nostalgia it is plainly obvious that CITES has failed in its objective of protecting nature from overexploitation.
We wouldn’t have gone from 700 listed species to over 40,000 if CITES was successful in its mandate. The IPBES report wouldn’t have found that trade is a major extinction driver. In this situation it seems unconscionable for IGOs and NGOs to continue to align themselves with an agenda that hides corporate overexploitation of nature behind the skirts of community livelihoods.
For those of you who would like to understand these issues in more detail, here is a link to our September 2023 Report, The BU$IN€$$ of Nature: https://natureneedsmore.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/The-Business-of-Nature-Web-Version.pdf