Legal and illegal wildlife trade 435


FIG. 1 Log total number of wildlife commodities from a country, which were (a) legally exported to or (b) seized in the USA during 1980–2013. Countries in grey are those from where no legal exports or seizures have been reported. The USA has a colour because of re-imports.


We assessed exports to the USA from UN Environment


Programme regions of our four focal types of products (live, processed leather products, meat and trophies). North America (i.e.Canada but notMexico intheUNEnvironment Programmeregion definition) exportedthe largestnumberof legal trophies and trophy parts to the USA (n = 195,549 indi- viduals, an annualmean of 5,587), the majority of whichwere bears (American black bear Ursus americanus and brown bear Ursus arctos), followed by 72,109 legal trophies exported from Asia and the Pacific (Fig. 2d). These were mainly teeth from hippopotamuses Hippopotamus amphibius and ivory tusks from African elephants Loxodonta africana, presum- ably sourced from Africa and then re-exported to the USA from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (hereafter Hong Kong). Sub-Saharan Africa exported the largest number of trophies seized upon entry into the USA (n = 1,690) including birds, felids elephants, primates, rhinoceroses, and species in the ‘other mammals’ category. Sixty per cent of legal trophies traded (Supplementary Table 3) with CITES source codes were considered wild- sourced and 37.5% were reported as captive or ranched (Table 3). Most of the legally imported leather products were ex- ported or re-exported from Europe (n = 46,590,955), and


Latin America and the Caribbean (n = 191,338)exported the majority of the processed leather products seized at entry (Fig. 2b). Of the legal leather products, 60.5% of trade by vol- ume with a CITES source codewas reported as wild-sourced, and 19.3% as captive or ranched, with c. 20%being pre- Convention or having ‘unknown’ as asourcecode(Table 3). Latin America and the Caribbean exported the most


meat to the USA both legally (n = 28,091.630 t) and seized (n = 390.473 t; Fig. 2c). This meat came mainly from the queen conch Strombus gigas. Almost all of the meat trade volume (89.9%) was wild-sourced, with only 4.4% from captive or ranched organisms (Table 3). Overall, plants were more common than animals in the


trade of live specimens, both legal and seized. Asia and the Pacific exported the majority of legally traded plants (n = 273,854,354) and animals (n = 18,602,706)and also seized plants (n = 230,599)and animals(n = 53,660)tothe USA (Fig. 2a). The majority of live plants from the region were orchids (Orchidaceae spp. and Orchidaceae hybrids), cycads (Cycadaceae) and euphorbias (Euphorbia) legally exported from Taiwan and Thailand, as well as ramin wood (Gonystylus) seized upon entry into the USA from Indonesia and China. Live animals from Asia and the Pacific included black corals (Antipatharia spp.) and


Oryx, 2021, 55(3), 432–441 © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000541


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