China, Vietnam, Laos are hotspots for the criminal wildlife trade: does Asia really care about biodiversity?
Pangolin scales at US$160 a kilogram, monkeys and wild cats for sale - the online trade in protected and rare species is thriving in Laos, a key Southeast Asian gateway to the insatiable Chinese and Vietnamese markets for animal products.
As world leaders gather in Egypt for the COP27 conference to address the climate crisis - and fringe events discuss the entwined conservation questions surrounding biodiversity - Asia's internet remains a bustling marketplace for the wildlife trade.
Laos, which borders both China and Vietnam, is already an arterial route for the multibillion-dollar illegal trade in smuggled rhinoceros horn, tiger parts, ivory and pangolin.
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It is a criminal racket that runs from west and southern Africa to customers in Asia demanding pets and ornaments or powders, broths and elixirs for traditional medicines.
At the same time, the market for Laos' domestic forest animals - deer, porcupines and squirrels - is also surging in an inflation-battered economy where wildlife experts say poaching is almost impossible to prevent.
On a 'Buy and Sell Wildlife' Facebook page, a broker proudly shows off photos featuring kilos of two-inch scales from the pangolin - a mammal whose skin and scales have made it one of the world's most trafficked creatures.
"I have 3kg right now, if you need more I can get them ... but it will take some time," the broker told This Week In Asia. "I buy them from villagers all over. I sell them for 6,000 baht (US$160) a kilo."
Pangolin scales are coveted in Chinese traditional medicine as a treatment for arthritis, although there is no evidence of any benefit. Two Southeast Asian pangolin species - the Sunda and the Philippine pangolin - are critically endangered according to the The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a 'red list' of at-risk flora and fauna.
Their demise has driven demand to poach other vulnerable pangolin species in Africa, says Steve Glaster of counter-trafficking group Freeland Foundation.
"Laos has become a 'free zone' for Vietnamese and Chinese to store and then move their products onto the destination market," he said, adding that the wildlife trade not only eviscerates biodiversity, but also risks new zoonotic diseases, which can be transmitted to humans from animals.
Other ads on the Facebook page - first unearthed by Econews Laos, an environment-focused media start-up in the communist country - offer deer antlers and bulls' heads, as well as dead squirrels, civet cats, live porcupines and monkeys.
Laos is a member of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the global treaty protecting endangered plants and animals, and has agreed to tackle the sale and trafficking of endangered species.
The country has banned the hunting of forest animals and the trade in wildlife, yet the practice continues across its swathes of remote forest communities who subsist on bushmeat but also sell monkeys, bats, squirrels and deer at border markets.
The proliferation of legal bear and tiger farms has also blurred the government position, conservationists say, with the commercial trade firing continued demand - both legal and otherwise - across Asia for animal parts and exotic pets.
Laos, a small landlocked nation, plays an oversized role in the global wildlife trade, conservationists say.
"It is a combination of easy availability of wildlife, parts and products, the presence of traders and suppliers offering them and its function as a demand centre," said Kanitha Krishnasamy, Southeast Asia director at the TRAFFIC non-governmental organisation.
"The existence of open trade in markets and shops has continued unabated despite ... repeated calls for them to be closed over the past decades."
Demand from neighbouring countries "for food, medicine, pets, collectibles and luxury items" continues to drive the trade, she added, while global crime gangs make use of Laos' "poor enforcement, porous borders and online trade" to deliver their illegal cargo.
The internet market has also exploded in neighbouring Myanmar during the border closures necessitated by the coronavirus, according to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund).
It says Myanmar's online illegal wildlife trade surged by 74 per cent from 2020 to 2021 as the pandemic shut borders.
Meanwhile, large shipments of African elephant ivory continue to be found at ports in Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, while investigators say Cambodia is fast becoming a safe transit zone for criminal syndicates moving tusks into Asia.
As Covid-19 spread fast in early 2020, China banned the trade in wildlife for consumption or ownership to curb risks of new crossover diseases.
Chinese authorities have continued cracking down on the trade. According to the Chinese nationalist newspaper Global Times, 14,000 "criminals were dealt with" between February and May this year alone, in a nationwide blitz on "hunting, artificial breeding, sale, purchase transportation, consumption import and export" of wildlife, which saw thousands of tiger, rhino, elephant and pangolin parts also seized.
But the online market suggests Chinese demand is still sky-high, observers say.
The role of transit countries such as Laos, with threadbare law enforcement and hard to police borders, is likely to be under the spotlight when the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) convenes in Montreal next month.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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