Legal and illegal wildlife trade 439
TABLE 5 Results of linear regression of legal trade and seizures against country area, overall number of species of mammals, birds and plants, number of endemic mammals, birds and plants, and number of threatened species (i.e. assessed by IUCN).
Variable
Country area (km2) No. of species
No. of endemics No. of threatened species
Legal trade Slope
1.75 428.29
1,261.85 10,558.43
R2
0.04 0.04 0.05 0.04
P
0.006 0.005 0.004 0.006
CITES-listed trademay have occurred before the specieswas categorized on the Red List and any concomitant trade re- strictions imposed. Information on whether goods are wild- sourced or captive/ranched also helps to shed light on differ- ences in trade between different product types (Table 4). Meat was disproportionately wild-sourced relative to other products, potentially a result of the challenges associated with captive-breeding compared to wild sourcing. Live indi- viduals were disproportionately reported as captive-raised, artificially-propagated or ranched, and dominated by artificially-propagated plants, probably a result of the ease of artificial propagation. Our results show that the number of animal and plant
products reported as being legally imported into the USA outnumber the amount seized by a factor of 148, but that with more than 6 million items registered as seizures during 1979–2014, the illegal trade into the USA (which is probably more substantial than the number of goods intercepted and seized) is considerable and poses a significant risk to bio- diversity conservation. In contrast to broader global trends (Underwood et al., 2013;Milliken, 2014; Funston et al., 2016), our study suggests that there has been a decrease in seizures of products from felids, elephants and rhinoceroses into the USA (but felids, mostly of the genus Lynx, are still the second most frequently seized taxon after ursids in recent USA–Canada trade). Three factors may contribute to these observed patterns: (1) improvements in enforcement and anti-poaching efforts in exporting countries (Stoner & Pervushina, 2012; Milliken, 2014), (2) improvements in en- forcement in the USA, (3) wild population declines, making these taxa/species less available, and (4) countries in Asia surpassing the USA as demand countries (i.e. high demand and export directly from range states to Asian countries rather than to the USA). However, poaching activities have also escalated, using more sophisticated equipment and approaches, including increased use of online markets on the dark web (Stoner & Pervushina, 2012). Thus, it is likely that increased demand from the largest importer of ivory and rhinoceros horn (i.e. East and South-east Asia) has displaced trade of rare animal products and in part ex- plains reduced imports into the USA (Underwood et al., 2013;Milliken, 2014). For most commodities, countries accounting for the lar- gest share of the legal trade also exported the largest number
n
194 194 164 201
Seizures Slope
0.025 7.07
32.58 169.33
R2 Pn ,0.0001
0.12 0.16 0.43 0.14
,0.0001 ,0.0001 ,0.0001
194 194 164 201
of illegal products, suggesting an overall positive relation- ship and interaction between legal and illegal trade flows. However, for leather products, for which Latin America and the Caribbean were responsible for most of the seized exports, Europe and Asia-Pacific accounted for most of the legal exports. Although Europe dominated the legal trade of processed leather products for the fashion industry, these do not originate from Europe but are imported to fashion houses in Italy and, to a lesser extent, France and other European countries, from other parts of the world, and then re-exported to the USA. Seized trophies came predominantly from African countries and the majority of these were vervet monkeys Chlorocebus pygerythrus and bonteboks Damaliscus pygargus from South Africa and African elephants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, seized pigeons and doves (Columbidae spp.) fromMexico and saiga antelope Saiga tatarica imported from Hong Kong (likely re-exports) are also found in the trophy category. In contrast, legally imported trophies were sourced predominantly from hunts of grizzly and American black bears in Canada (Garshelis et al., 2016;McLellan et al., 2017; Petrossian et al., 2016), although there is animal smug- gling in this region (von Scheel, 2018). Although African countries were the biggest exporters of
trophies seized at the USA border, the volumes of seized tro- phies were dwarfed by the number of legal trophies export- ed from Africa to the USA. Legal trophy hunting in many African countries is big business, with South Africa alone generating an estimated USD 137 million from international hunting in 2014 (Sinovas et al., 2016). However, although legal regulated trophy hunting has the potential to contri- bute to sustainable livelihoods of local communities, this is a complex and controversial topic. The import of high-value leather products from Europe illustrated another complica- tion of the role of biological resource use in improving local livelihoods. When the value-adding production stage takes place beyond the native range of a species, this reduces in- country benefits, including for conservation of wild animals in their range states, and may promote the farming of these species (e.g. crocodiles and rhinoceroses in southern Africa, Robinson et al., 2015, and vicuña ranches in South America, Lichtenstein, 2009). Our analysis of factors that may explain trade volumes found that although multiple factors were significant, in
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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