Word: wildaid
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...China's demand for exotic, edible wildlife. "As purchasing power in China grows, demand has just exploded," says James Compton, who runs the Southeast Asia office of TRAFFIC, the most prominent group fighting the illegal wildlife trade worldwide. Tim Redford, a Bangkok-based researcher for the conservation group WildAid, estimates that between 1% and 10% of smuggled animals are seized by government officials in efforts to combat an illegal industry worth billions of dollars annually. Between 1999 and 2003, Chinese authorities alone seized 18,850 live endangered wild animals, including lizards, pythons, turtles and rare fish. The slaughter...
...Trade in Endangered Species, which was established in 1975. But huge profits, widespread corruption, underfunding of enforcement agencies and a lack of political will mean that the bans enacted in the treaty are often ineffective, conservationists say. "It's a very pessimistic situation," Redford says gloomily. Evidence collected by WildAid suggests that increased seizures in recent years aren't so much evidence of more vigilance by governments as a sharp growth in the trade itself. A recent study by Conservation International concluded that worldwide, less than 1% of natural resource crimes result in punishment or sanctions. Even when lawbreakers...
...region to stock up on snakes, geckos, flying lizards and other exotic pets. But the sheer scale of demand from China makes everything else pale into insignificance. Up to 80% of the illegal wildlife smuggled out of Southeast Asia is headed for China, says Steve Galster, who heads WildAid's Bangkok office. Illegal traders have had to adapt to the changed marketplace. "I had to take a crash course in Mandarin," laughs Hendrawan, an affable young Indonesian who runs a sprawling wildlife processing facility in South Sumatra. "My family is Chinese but we don't speak it at home...
...runs the reptile abattoir. "They always ask for more, but snakes are getting harder and harder to find, especially the pythons. The minimum size is 2.5 meters. It used to be we could find many of even 7 and 8 meters but now we are happy with 4 meters." WildAid's Galster says a better solution is to eliminate demand. "If we could get the Chinese public to stop buying and consuming this stuff," he says, "it would have a huge positive impact...
...Certainly not from Bangkok's Association of Shark Fin Restaurants, a group of about 30 Chinatown eateries. They're biting back with a $2.7 million lawsuit against WildAid and the local office of J. Walter Thompson, the New York City-based advertising agency that created the campaign for free. The charge: false claims by WildAid have caused their sales of shark dishes to drop by 50%. Last week in court, David Lau, secretary-general of the association, personally cross-examined Galster, alleging that the American conservationist had staged videos and faked photos of dying sharks. To TIME, he also claimed...