trade suspension from CITES in 2013. Nevertheless, when Doumbouya was arrested, he was still carrying blank CITES export permits, several years after he’d left his post.


And where did those animals go? China was a major importer of chimpanzees from Guinea beginning around 2007, since that country’s rapidly expanding middle class demanded zoos and safari parks and animal entertainment shows that are popular in China. In 2010 alone, China imported 69 chimpanzees from Guinea under fraudulent CITES permits that indicated the animal were “captive-bred” and therefore legal to trade, and existing data indicates a total of 138 chimpanzees and 10 gorillas were sent to China over a period of several years.


Crossing the frontier


The illegal trade in elephant ivory or rhino horn is a grim traffic that tolls a steady march towards extinction. Yet the numbers – no matter how devastating – are clear: every pair of tusks represents a dead elephant, and every horn represents a dead rhinoceros. The live illegal wildlife trade, however, only hints at the devastation and the loss of biodiversity. Who can say how many bonobos really died as a result of the infant that was seized from a speedboat in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month? What do the dozens of slow lorises confiscated in a recent raid on Bangkok’s Chatuchak market say about the impact on wild populations? More information is clearly needed to understand the scale and scope of the live illegal trade in wildlife, but the more pertinent questions are what are the levers that policy-makers can use to stop live trade and have we left enough time to put them in place.


Photo Credit: IUCN Photo Credit: GRASP


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UNEP FRONTIERS 2016 REPORT

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