 Thank you very much for coming and again a thank you to the transnational environmental crime project for hosting me as a visiting fellow This talk I'm going to be doing today is actually a joint piece of research between myself and you might know Professor Nigel South at University of Essex and this draws on some of his research from several years ago And then research that I've conducted as well So what I'll be doing is comparing these two black markets wildlife trafficking and drug trafficking How I'll lay this out first. I'll talk about the methodology of how we actually ended up comparing the two different black markets Also, why we bothered what what is it about drugs and wildlife that can we can learn from each other? Or what does one have to speak to the other about? And I'll get into the bulk of that data so the overviews would we look at the facts around drugs and wildlife? What what do they look like? How are they similar and how are they different and then our findings of what we found from this? So the methodology as I said draws on on two pieces of research It first drew on on my case study research that I conducted in Russia far East and that was two case studies as been mentioned one of Falcons and one of Burr and How I collected the data for these case studies was was in three ways The first thing that I did is that the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora More commonly known as CITES has a very thorough robust online trade database So each party that becomes a member of CITES, which is about I think it's a hundred and seventy eight countries now They have to report every year about all legal trade to the secretariat that's in Geneva and part of that data set is also everything that they found to be illegal, so And this is the range of wildlife and that's what's interesting about wild life black markets and wildlife trade in particular Is how diverse it is so it's live animals and plants derivatives products and those derivatives and products take on enormous range of diversity clothes Traditional medicines decorative objects carvings bark teeth that the list goes on But all of that gets reported to the CITES secretariat and we can all access this database online for free So that was the bulk of the data and then also a content analysis of newspaper articles And this was both in English and Russian languages to see what in the Russia Faris They're actually talking about are they reporting other kinds of wildlife that's getting trafficked in different areas and then finally I've conducted 21 semi-structured interviews and this was with Russian experts so local NGOs in Moscow and Vladivostok as well as embassy officials of the US embassies CITES officials customs agents police officers basically anyone who would talk to me I was trying to to collect data about what they perceive the structure of Wildlife trafficking in Russia Far East was So based upon that data Nigel and I then compare that to his research that he endured Conducted in 1990 and you'll see that they've come up with these typologies of Traffickers and we take those drug trafficking typologies and we apply them in the context of wildlife Again, why did we do this? What's the purpose of that? Well, as you might know already There's a tremendous amount of research around drug trafficking, but possibly very little around wildlife Trafficking so we thought that we could gain further insight Into the illegal wildlife trade by comparing it to drug trafficking Which is much more thoroughly researched The intent is to contribute not only to the studies drug trafficking But it's also its relationship with other form of organized criminal enterprises So do we learn something about organized crime when we look at drug trafficking and can that teach us about organized crime in the context of wildlife? and then obviously or hopefully as many of us do with the eight the Main aim is to try to aid in prevention tactics if we can learn more about these how can we actually then Contribute to policy and contributed to prevention strategies to actually help help stop these and help law enforcement and policy makers the overviews then so to give you an idea of What's happening in regards to these two traits? So as I said extensive research around drugs I'm sure all of us know that there's a huge literature around drugs and drug trafficking There's very limited research though about wildlife though. That is changing and they're there's becoming a greater amount of literature if you look at the Estimated certainly estimated amounts of profits that the two black markets have the United Nations Office of drugs and crime Estimate that the total profits at the end of the chain for drugs to be around four billion US dollars Each year four hundred billion US dollars each year. So a tremendous the biggest black market on the in the planet It's it's incredibly profitable Wildlife is estimated to be between 10 and 20 billion US dollars annually and that number varies depending on who you ask and what's included We're to take illegal timber trafficking within this figure and also Overfishing so illegal fisheries that number would most likely be bigger, but these are estimates based on Numbers that are already probably sketchy to begin with Which I'll talk a bit about a bit more about And what's also similar between the two that's kind of interesting that we thought is that they're actually categorized in somewhat similar fashions so drugs tend to be categorized and as far as danger On some levels so category a drugs category B drugs as they use in Europe for criminalizing them and then wildlife gets broken down into categories that are somewhat similar you look at species and so we can Break them down in somewhat similar patterns in similar ways The stages also have a fair amount of similarity to them So drugs to be available to the market have to be cultivated So you have to grow the plants first and then they have to be processed actually into the drug that's going to be sold Most of wildlife is that way too that you have to actually capture kill harvest Depending on what the species is the type of wildlife that is in demand and then a fair amount of wildlife actually does get Produced or manufactured into some kind of product There is is certainly a live animal trade, but then there is also these Very big black markets of as I mentioned timber for instance has to get processed fur has to get processed Traditional medicines they all have to be actually manufactured into whatever the final product is it's going to be sold So similarities there between drugs and wildlife The way that drugs and wildlife are smuggled are actually similar as well We found the the tactics that perpetrators use The first one there on the body so drugs will be either ingested or just physically hidden under people's clothing and that happens with wildlife as well that it gets hidden under clothing and In that case, Australia has some very famous pictures that always come out in wildlife Trafficking discussions of of the men wearing vests that have these egg pouches Specifically designed where they can smuggle out eggs or have reptiles wrapped around their legs taped them So they put wildlife on their body similar to as I mentioned drugs People use their luggage. So just actually carrying it on planes or boats in their vehicles Using their vehicles to smuggle the drugs or the wildlife This can be very elaborate having hidden compartments in cars when you're crossing borders But a lot of the same tactics being used Pretty much common throughout both of them and arguably for other black markets as well Bribery is a is a integral feature to how wildlife and drugs are both smuggled and this could be Customs agents police officers border agents all of these people are are bribed to be able to smuggle these these different articles Where we start to see differences though is that drug trafficking? has a very particular Structure to it because it's never legal drugs are never legal cocaine is never allowed to be smuggled or to be transported Haraway and all of those How that difference from wildlife is that some wildlife? It's perfectly legal to be transporting it to sell it. So what happens in wildlife then is there's a lot more Laundering or forging of paperwork to actually be able to do it for instance in my work around Falcons It is perfectly legal to farm falcons so you can raise them in captive-bred facilities That's perfectly legal in your cities It isn't legal though to take a bird from the wild But what will happen is paperwork about this bird being captive can just be given to a wild species It's actually been taken illegally. So this forging paperwork actually allows wildlife to be laundered So where it is actually illegal it looks like it's legal because the way the way the paperwork works This isn't going to happen in drugs. I'm not gonna have a certificate saying it's okay for you to have that evil cocaine in your luggage It's always illegal And because it's always illegal you have these elaborate packaging you hear about airdrops Used from Columbia in your Mexican cartels. Well, they're happy massive packages of drugs where they'll Have a helicopter or a small plane Fly to where they want it to know just drop it out into the middle of the Arizona desert for instance in the US So you have these very elaborate kind of smuggling things that happen with drugs There is certainly some elaborate smuggling of live animals But but we argue that there's there's some difference here in perpetration because of the pure illegality of the drug trade a bit more about the figures that I presented earlier, so The estimates of this 400 billion dollars a year or how much drug The the actual quantities of drug that actually get Smuggled these are estimates just based upon assumptions where they Get these assumptions from where the estimates are based on is the turnover of drugs the amount of trade and the profits and What the different figures of the UNODC comes up with then is that at that first stage At production when it first gets sold drugs are worth around 13 billion Dollars a year, but at the next stage at the wholesale when it's getting ready to go to the final buyers It goes up to 94 billion and then you have another increase up to around 334 billion at the final stage and these are all based on Retail values that we would that experts have gone in and estimated how much is act or how much it's worth at those different stages Wildlife has similar stages the trouble is then though What gets reported about wildlife is usually What the perpetrator is saying that the value of the wildlife is worth and they don't have an interest in actually reporting Actually, how valuable it is so it's based our estimates are based upon these customs figures Rather than a market value of actually how much profit they would be receiving from selling the wildlife Other problems with the sort of data that you get around Prophets and how much it's worth estimating how large it is is that the incredibly hidden nature of it and this idea of Who are the victims in wildlife trafficking obviously wildlife isn't reported that they've been trafficked So you're reliant upon people coming forward or being uncovered by customs and border agents There's also no set standard value to wildlife what one person or one country would regard for their timber say Is it necessarily going to be what it's worth in another country or to other people so Without a standardization of value of wildlife this 10 to 20 billion a year. It is it's really really just an estimate and Then I argue another work as well that this doesn't also cover Intrinsic values that we can talk about wildlife that this is purely a market kind of consumer Focus or conception of what wildlife is worth. What about other? Value that wildlife has to us as people aesthetic values Ecosystem services. What about the destruction to environmental places and and that's not captured in this kind of Just purely for profit kind of value that we're assigned so just the two examples that Generated from my case studies the fur Trade is organized in the following way at least in the Russian part race where I collected my data You have hoaching with what's called indiscriminate traps and indiscriminate traps just refers to the fact that this Connambare steel trap That just lays open can catch any sort of animal. That's why it's indiscriminate. It isn't Species specific you can catch any sort of thing that steps into it What happens then is the trapper will take that pelt of that animal and sell it to a middle man What might happen though is that because this trap is indiscriminate maybe he caught something that he wasn't supposed to I say he because I don't think there's many women trappers as far as I can tell but they then What if they've caught a tiger which is certainly possible in Russia or a leopard something? That's totally illegal that they're not supposed to have in those rare instances The trapper can't pass it on to a middleman because there is an illegal market for a tiger skin What happens in the Russian Far East is if you do actually catch something that's endangered You're very close to the Chinese border and you you cross over into China and sell it there If it is something legal though, it's a fox. It's a sable You sell it to the middleman and the middleman carries on selling it down the chain So there's a huge market for fur in Russia. So all of these pelts get collected for the annual auction every year what's found though is that There's quotas set for sable, which is the most popular fur in Russia and every year All of us could go and look right now at the st. Petersburg fur auction website The amount of fur that is sold exceeds the set quotas So there's a legal tracking going on there as well Even though it's legal to take sable more sable than is supposed to be taken is taken every single year So there's illegal blended in with the legal as well even in the week in these Very prestigious fur auctions And then as I mentioned in the third point the selling on the black market if you catch an endangered species It's got to go to the black market. You can't go into the into the legitimate fur industry Structure very differently than though if you look at Falcon trade, which is a live trade People in the Middle East and others argue also in the Far East in Japan where Falcon re still practice So using Falcons to hunt It's a very popular sport still in those countries in those areas So there is this demand for live birds to participate in this activity How that happens then though is you need a very specialized person an ornithologist or someone with a Intricate knowledge of birds to actually go and collect eggs for kept your young birds out in the wild so it becomes a very specialized kind of task and particularly it isn't just someone will go out and collect eggs it usually Looks like it's filling a specific demand So someone wants a bird they've asked through their network and it gets funneled to this ornithologist Who then goes out and actually takes takes the egg or takes the unbird? Healer then picks it up and transports it these really long distances. So traditional Falcon Falcon range used to be in Central Asia, but most of the populations there have been completely decimated So the last sort of remaining populations are in Russia and very remote regions in the Far East and so you have this Epic kind of transport going on thousands and thousands of miles of the bird getting from Far East Russia into the Middle East This is usually happening by trains boats or planes But key to that as I mentioned before is bribery you need to be bribing customs officials along that route or you need to be bribing transportation people along that route so that the train employee or the Airline employee will let you take something on that's illegal So how they differ then that the fur can be very individual. It's opportunistic You might take more than you're allowed to while you're out there or accidentally Kill something that's endangered It goes through the middleman into the industry so it gets laundered into a legal Business most of the time though. There is that black market that I mentioned of endangered skins Falcons and it takes on a different structure. It's a very specialist. It's very planned Dealers smuggling along very specific routes of one location to the destination location And the experts that I talked to argue that organized crime was involved in this and They didn't think that it was the actual the Russian mafia so to speak But they argued that it was more organized crime coming from the Middle East that would organize the the actual Transportation route in the smuggling route Again, that's all very anecdotal There isn't any really hard evidence around there, but then they do think that organized crime Facilitated this simple chain network of smuggling How then? Does that compare to what previous research around drug trafficking actually showed? so Nigel and his colleague Dorn argued back in 1990 that there's two sets of Category where you could break down the drug trafficking and that was multi commodity Actors that are involved and then specialist actors that are involved And part of the multi commodity they argue are these business side liners as they called them so You're involved in dealing drugs, but it's not your main business You do it as part of other illegal activities And we found that that fit very well with the fir tree that I just described then It isn't your main intention or your your purpose to be engaged in illegal black market behavior But you might do it as a sideline to other legal activity that you're actually involved in So business side liners is one that we felt you could see Correlation to between drug trafficking and wildlife trafficking also in the multi commodity Actors you have the criminal diversifier. So someone who is involved in drug trafficking It's argued and you see a lot of literature is a very rational choice You make a lot of money from selling drugs So it's an economic choice that you engage in Particularly for the profits Where we saw correlations there is you do see Drug traffickers that are actually moving into wildlife and arguably for the same kind of rational economic reasons And we see this mostly Coming out of other literature not from the research that I did but there's quite a few reports coming out of Brazil in particular where Customs agents estimate there that around 40% of all Drug seizures actually have some amount of wildlife in them. So you have What they're arguing is clear evidence there that the drug traders are making this very rational economic choice to Diversify and get involved in other kinds of black market profits You also have the in regulars in the multi commodity actors and these are what I referred to For wildlife is the indiscriminate trafficking. So it's an opportunistic kind of thing rather than an Intent or a specific purpose You also see that in drug trafficking at the street level where there's market opportunities You aren't necessarily intending to be a street corner drug seller, but the opportunity arises It's profitable. So you might take advantage of it. So again Opportunistic irregular is where where you might have the opportunity to make money in a legal fashion as I mentioned then that South and dorm breakdown the actors from the multi commodities that I mentioned and that there's also the specialists people that are involved in drug Trafficking or as we argue wildlife trafficking for very specific reasons and in this case you could see that for the smuggling to order for the wildlife that a Person in the Middle East has a desire to have a very particular kind of Falcon and they Use their network to have that order placed in the drugs you see that it in friendship networks that often Help to perpetrate drug trafficking that it's the people that you know that you facilitate that through it isn't necessarily a You're not dealing with strangers ever you're dealing with people that you know So it's a very specialist kind of thing You know where to get the particular drug you're going or that you'd like So you use your friendship networks to actually obtain it Trading charities is another of the categories that South and Doron present and it's this quasi Ideological commitment. So there are people that are using drugs because They believe everyone should be allowed to use drugs and that they will use marijuana for instance regardless of its illegality and they're not doing it as some Resistance only doing it because it's illegal, but they're doing it because they think it should be legal and that they're going to continue using it Anyway, we argue that you can see the same in wildlife in the fact around traditional medicines that people particularly eastern cultures that believe that traditional medicines are Valuable in terms of health and in curing certain illnesses. They do so out of an ideological commitment It's a cultural choice to actually engage in this kind of behavior So they're not doing it again because it's illegal They're doing it because it's something that we actually believe in so that there's there's a different motivation behind it there The the illegality is is a bit of just a Side effect rather than the purpose South and Doron also had two other categories that we didn't necessarily find Correlations to wildlife they have retail specialists. So shops that are particularly for that For selling drugs that you go there because you know that that's where you're going to get it We might be able to sort of see this in traditional medicines But even traditional medicine stores that exist outside of the east those are fairly well regulated And it's difficult to know if there are black market products in those kinds of stores And the second one, we're not sure if there is a correlation is state sponsored traders So you do have some governments in narcotics and drugs in particular that are actually facilitating drug trade on some level providing the infrastructure or at least not cracking down on it and I have a question mark there around Cambodia need the evil logging There's been reports by the NGO global witness several years ago that it's actually the Cambodian government that gives the logging licenses to Particularly friends of the family or different organized crime groups, but these logging permits are in areas that are actually protected forests So it's argued that the Cambodian government is the one that's facilitating the illegal logging So that could be state sponsored again, that's Not so much anecdotal. There's fairly good evidence for it, but Further research has to be done to really to cement those kinds of ties that they're they're facilitating it so other findings that we developed around the two black markets is that the possible increasing connections between the two and Lorraine Elliott here that's running the tech project has talked about parallel trafficking of Not only drugs and wildlife, but other black markets that you see using the same smuggling routes or using experts that know The different networks using them to traffic different kinds of products There's also evidence coming out of Chatham House of the Royal Institute of Affairs in London so came in brak study that drug trafficking is actually funded by illegal logging So the connection there being the profits that you're making off of illegal wildlife Can be actually funneled into drug trafficking and drug trade And then also another study there by putting Nelson's showing that seasonal drugs and wildlife so When you're animal that you're poaching isn't in season you'll turn to drugs and vice versa So it's actually just a very physical kind of cyclical thing that you'll be doing drugs drugs or wildfire We talked about expanding this so what's known about wildlife has been so limited But has increased so I think we could revisit this and look at other kinds of wildlife Structure and we talk about looking at other frameworks. What about illegal timber or fishing in comparison to Drug trafficking and what about illegal wildlife trade in urban areas that might be a better comparison to drug trafficking since Drug trade actually occurs in urban areas Other comparisons and ties we might look at human trafficking. Obviously, there's Again anecdotal evidence that though that is blended in as well that as humans are being trafficked wild life Or drugs can be trafficked with them and then a fairly Well the funding of terrorism and militias and this is kind of gained a bit of prominence in the last I would say two years studies coming out that they do think that wildlife in particular ivory Some illegal logging might actually be used by terrorists As a way of gaining funding so that they can buy arms or fund their militias So some ties there for the research that might be might be interesting What we really would speculate at the end though is is what can we learn from the fight against the drug trade? right the war on drugs and very recent reports have talked about that Maybe most of the world would agree. It's probably a failure. So what can we learn on how we've? Attacked this drug problem. What can we learn in trying to deal with wildlife? so the move in in the war on drugs a discussion sometimes revolves to should we decriminalize it and Then the discussion turns on wildlife should we also decriminalize the trade in some wildlife and that's an ongoing debate and just within Just last month in March the Sides has its Convention that happens every few years and the discussion always turns to should we allow trade in ivory rhinoceros horn will that actually Decrease the amount of crime that's associated with it. So there's this ongoing debate of what can we learn around decriminalizing different trades What we have seen it's clear coming out of a study in 2009 is that For instance if we turn to the US if you look at the amount of resources dedicated to fighting both of these The drug enforcement agency has 5,000 agents in the US That's how much effort they have put into the war on drugs The US Fish and Wildlife Service though, which is the only agency that really deals with wildlife trafficking Excuse me only has 200 agents. So there's an incredible amount of resource differential there Which says something about priority that we're very concerned about drugs not necessarily so concerned about the illegal wildlife trade and and Also what we can look at in terms of of drugs versus wildlife is is the punitive nature of how we've gone with drugs giving huge jail sentences and Fines is that the way to go? Is that how we should be approaching wildlife? Which currently has very little punishment small fines that are argued don't deter people from actually trading it So I would argue no, we shouldn't go the way that we've gotten with drugs, which is incredibly punitive and has created this huge jail culture But maybe it's not where we're at it wild either where we have very limited penalties and and these are Some of those final thoughts from from the research that we did Thank you