16 June 2008
Sophisticated Trafficking Networks Move Contraband
Chief of Interpol’s wildlife crime division outlines transnational challenges
Peter Younger, a program manager and criminal intelligence analyst in Interpol’s wildlife crime unit, recently spoke with America.gov about illegal trafficking in endangered wildlife.
Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization, has 186 member countries and works with law enforcement agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide to facilitate cross-border police cooperation in combating all forms of international crime. The Interpol wildlife crime unit was established as a three-year pilot project in 2006 with the help of U.S.-based donors International Federation for Animal Welfare, the Bosack & Kruger Charitable Foundation and Safari Club International.
Resources are always stretched in crime fighting, but an African initiative – Project Oasis – to improve law enforcement in Africa will include wildlife trafficking. “The [Interpol] secretary-general has decided that wildlife is such a significant issue in that continent that we will have a wildlife crime component within Project Oasis as well as a wildlife crime program in the rest of the world,” Younger said, adding, “It’s an encouraging start.” (See “Wildlife Trafficking Is a Serious Problem, Lucrative Business.”)
Some excerpts from the interview appear below:
(begin transcript)
America.gov: What is the state of illegal wildlife trafficking today?
Younger: I think the first thing to get a grip on as far as the wildlife crime issue is concerned is that … this is serious and organized transnational crime. It has been so defined by UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) and the U.N. generally. When you appreciate it from that point of view, whilst the commodity has an impact from the ecological, natural, environmental point of view, for the people that are engaged in the activity this is essentially crime for money.
What we found, particularly in the more organized groups that are engaged in this, is what we like to call peripheral crime issues … pretty much anything you can think of: corruption of officials, falsification of documents, forgery, intimidation right through, up to and including murder of law enforcement officials and others.
We’ve done analysis and we’ve carried out operations, and assisted some of our countries’ work on smuggling organizations, some of which are family groups …. and once we start to dig into these things we find that not only are they smuggling wildlife, for example, but they’ll be smuggling narcotics, or diamonds or gold bullion. They are usually involved in false and fraudulent passport applications and travel documents. There are all sorts of these peripheral issues.
If you are smuggling a commodity for money, and let’s be honest here, the money to be made is considerable. If you have to set up an organization to smuggle large quantities of anything from country A to country B, transiting B and C, then you have an organized structure and an illicit smuggling pipeline, because in order to facilitate that, invariably in the developing world, there are issues of corruption of officials, of senior customs officers turning a blind eye, etcetera. Once you have that pipeline open, then you can smuggle pretty much anything down it. So if you can’t source wildlife today, and somebody says ‘Listen, I’ve got a shipment of heroin, or I’ve got some illegal immigrants, or I’ve got some prostitutes that I want to get to somewhere, you have a ready-made pipeline.
Q: So the middleman goes to the transport fixer?
Younger: He’s got the connections in country B to get something through. He’s got somebody in his pocket or he’s got a system whereby he can get illegal contraband across a border. So if it’s not ivory or tiger skins or rhino horn or anything else, it can be another commodity. The end result is the same: it’s just a commodity for money.
Q: Human beings, too?
Younger: Yes.
Q: Have ivory smugglers in Africa become more organized?
Younger: Absolutely. As trade sanctions and conventions begin to bite on a marketplace, then the demand will usually accelerate the supply. And we saw this … certainly when we looked at it in detail last year. For about the previous 18 months we saw a real spike, for example, in ivory trafficking from West Africa to Southeast Asia. When we started to look at some of these syndicates, we found that they had developed a very sophisticated structure to move that ivory. We’re talking about quantities of around three tons a shipment. Now that’s not something you can stuff in a suitcase and carry on an airplane. This is sophisticated containerization…It was in containers. But it was moved under the disguise of legitimate import-exports, so there was a legitimate business which was operating as a front for the illegal trafficking.
Now when you think about it, we looked at a number of shipments, and it was three tons per shipment. And off the top of my head I cannot remember how many elephants that equates to, but right from the supply end, somebody’s got to go out and shoot these things, and you don’t get them all in the same place, so there has to be a collection point. There has to be domestic shipment. There has to be concealment. There has to be international trafficking. There has to be a distribution network at the consumer end, which includes it going to factories and workshops to be turned into things that tourists like to buy. Quite sophisticated. Very, very well organized. We estimated that the 20 tons that we looked at in total would have equated at a wholesale price of about $26 million worth. So, the money’s there.
Q: Are drugs sometimes shipped with wildlife?
Younger: We’ve had instances where drugs have been concealed in among shipments of things like venomous snakes, for example, the theory being that customs officers are a little less likely to do an inspection on something that is full of venomous snakes.
And in the former Soviet Union and some of the Eastern bloc countries where the caviar markets are, we’ve seized shipments of illegal caviar coming into the West, which is largely controlled by Russian crime gangs. Now the same Russian crime gangs are smuggling in weapons, they are smuggling out women, caviar, narcotics, amphetamines, heroin, cocaine backwards and forwards [with] significant and high levels of violence to protect their business interests.
Q: Are there regional hot spots for smuggling?
Younger: Yes, there are, and it largely depends on the commodity you look at. For example, we’re just about to embark in collaboration with the World Bank on a study looking at the illegal timber trade, because timber is by definition part of wildlife. Now looking at hotspots for that sort of thing, you’re talking about places like South America, and Central Africa particularly, Indonesia and the Indonesian archipelago. So for timber, they are the hot spots. For ivory, obviously, you are talking about Africa. The same applies for rhino. Not so much smuggling in Asian elephants …. I think because of their numbers -- there are not so many on the ground.
Q: Isn’t Asian elephant ivory more prized on the Chinese and Japanese black market?
Younger: Yes, it is, but it seems to be more difficult. We certainly don’t see quite as much … We have considerable problems at the moment with tigers. India, Nepal -- tiger trade over there is a real concern. That is mostly moving further east. Then you move down into Oceania and parts of South America for trade in things like hard corals. They are hot spots, from a source country point of view. And then of course you have to…get your head around the consumer problem as well, the demand side. And that’s predominantly the USA, mainland Europe, and particularly for things like traditional medicines, you are probably talking about China.
Q: What successes have you had with programs such as ASEAN-WEN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations-Wildlife Enforcement Network], for instance?
Younger: They’ve started getting some traction in ASEAN countries. The Lusaka Agreement Task Force in East Africa, that’s a six-country cooperative agreement, they have good results. Certain countries are doing fairly good work, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Within the resources that it has, [it] does excellent work. We have started to see an increase in South America now. We’ve just recently assisted the Brazilian police with a major operation they’ve run on the gathering and illegal trafficking in hard coral in Brazil. Now, that was going to 10 countries predominately in Europe, some to the USA. We are starting to make some successes.
There’s been some good work done on ivory trafficking, we get good cooperation on that. Law enforcement agencies and we get a significant amount of support from NGOs, particularly in Africa. We’ve had some good results there, as well. Australia is really starting to make its presence felt. They’ve just started a working group to look at wildlife issues in their region of the world which is encouraging. We’ve had preliminary dialog with another Asian group … the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement network...that’s just starting, and I think they want to model that on the ASEAN concept.
Q: Illicit wildlife trafficking is said to net between 10 and 20 billion dollars a year. Is this figure accurate?
Younger: That’s a fair estimate. Bear in mind that the vast majority of wildlife that is traded is traded quite lawfully …. The [Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species] regulates trade and recognizes that countries have a right to the use of their natural resources … that includes fish and timber, which are big, big commodities to trade. The illegal trade by its very nature is hidden, it’s covert. What we seize and what we see as a percentage of the total is very hard to guess; any figures are bound to be an estimate. But generally if you talk to law enforcement people and customs border authorities and have a look at the seizures that have been made, our best guess is anything from 10 [percent] to 15 percent of the lawful trade, which gets you into the $10 [billion] to $20 billion plus, but it’s only an educated guess. It’s very difficult to say. And you have to look at particularly the seizure figures, and some agencies would say that their success rate on seizures is only about 15 percent … they actually catch only 15 percent of what is moving. But that has to be seen in the light of the meager resources …. You have to look at the success rates in the light of the resources that are there to do it.
Many countries do great work. It’s just when you get into multilateral stuff where you need international coordination or support, it is there where it starts to get thin on the ground …. We tracked shipment of ivory last year that came out of Tanzania, and it went from Tanzania to Nairobi, Nairobi to Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Singapore and Singapore to Vientiane. That happened in the space of two or three days. So unless you can pull all those people together and get them to work cooperatively in tracking and dealing with this stuff, it can be really difficult.
(end transcript)
