The Numbers of the Trade
In this chapter, the nature of the illegal wildlife trade is approached by quantitative analyses of wildlife seizures. Wildlife confiscations over a 10 -year period in the European Union were analysed and presented by graphics and maps to provide an overa
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The Numbers of the Trade
In this chapter1 the illegal trade in wildlife, with a focus on the trade in animals and animal products, is approached and propositions are discussed based on quantitative analyses of confiscations in the EU. While several studies have previously been conducted to analyse confiscations of wildlife in the US by using the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Law Enforcement Management Information Systems (LEMIS) database (e.g. Rice and Moore 2008; Schlaepfer et al. 2005; Stiles and Martin 2009; Petrossian et al. 2016), or global wildlife confiscations published by Traffic2 (e.g. Rosen and Smith 2010) and the WCMC-CITES trade database (e.g. Wyatt 2013), there are no studies that have analysed overall wildlife seizures in the EU. Therefore, this exploratory quantitative study fills this gap by identifying illegal wildlife imports into the EU. According to Momii (2002) the EU is believed to account for one-third of the demand for the global illegal wildlife trade. The EU is the foremost destination market for wildlife in the world, coordinated by well organized, loose networks based in the EU and in the source regions (Europol 2011). The nature of the illegal wildlife trade in relation to the EU is approached by quantitative analyses of wildlife confiscations in the EU over a 10 year period. This chapter describes the diversity and transnational characteristics of the trade by asking what kind of wildlife is illegally traded, what are the source and destination countries, what kinds of smuggling and laundering methods are used and who are the offenders. Based on the quantitative analyses three case studies were selected to investigate qualitatively.
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Parts of this chapter have been published in the article: Van Uhm, D.P. (2016a). Illegal trade in wildlife and harms to the world. In Spapens, A.C.M., White, R. & Huisman, W. (Eds.) Environmental Crime in Transnational Context. Farnham: Ashgate publishing. 2 Traffic is the international organization dedicated to ensuring that the trade in wildlife is not a threat to the conservation of nature. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 D.P. van Uhm, The Illegal Wildlife Trade, Studies of Organized Crime 15, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42129-2_6
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6 The Numbers of the Trade
A Multi-billion Dollar Industry
Estimates of the value of global crimes are usually uncritically reproduced, because they are assumed to have been generated by experts (Andreas and Greenhill 2010). The figure of $20 billion that is often quoted to indicate the illegal wildlife trade was initially the estimated value of the legal trade in wildlife by Traffic in the 1990s (ibid.) and Interpol has been incorrectly quoted as a source for this illegal wildlife trade figure (Søyland 2000). Based on a calculation method used for decades by Traffic the global and EU value of the wildlife trade is estimated in this section.3 The value of the legal global international wildlife trade, including non-CITES species, is conservatively estimated to be about €86 billion per year, based
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