Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking Presentation

The meeting was designed to advance a framework for an international agreement to take the place of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. President Bush addressed the delegates and urged a new path forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that also allows all countries to grow and prosper.

On wildlife conservation, last month the United States and the Russian Federation concluded a bilateral agreement on the conservation and management of the shared polar bear population. The treaty entered into force on September 23, 2007. It will protect females with cubs and cubs less than one year old to help ensure the health of the breeding population. The commission created by the treaty will also recommend measures for the bear’s habitat protection.

To address broader threats to polar bear populations worldwide, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this year proposed to list polar bears as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. A final decision will be made in January 2008.

On protecting the oceans, last year President Bush established the world’s largest marine protected area: the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. This Monument became the largest single conservation area in the history of the United States, and the largest protected marine area in the world. It is home to 4,500 square miles of coral reef habitat, the largest remote reef system in the world, and the reefs and surrounding tropical waters are home to more than 7,000 marine species, from Hawaiian Monk Seals to spinner dolphins to the green sea turtle.

Overall, the protected area established covers nearly 140,000 square miles, if you laid it on top of the continental United States, it would stretch from Chicago to Miami. And now this fragile treasure is permanently protected from illegal fishing, vessel pollution, and unsustainable human intrusion. On coral reef protection, in 1994, the U.S. launched the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) with seven other countries, the World Bank and the United Nations Environment Programme. Our shared goal is to preserve coral reefs and related ecosystems worldwide.

Today, ICRI brings together over 40 governments, international organizations, scientific entities, and non-governmental organizations committed to reversing the global degradation of coral reefs. As the current co-chair of ICRI, the United States continues to lead on coral reef conservation, at home and internationally. Finally, I’m guessing that many of you – given your interest in marine science and policy – may be following the Senate’s current consideration of U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention.

This spring, President Bush again called on the Senate to ratify this treaty because it would strengthen our national security interests, our sovereignty, our economic rights, and our leadership on oceans issues and beyond. Joining would also give a big boost to our efforts to define our extended continental shelf off of Alaska. As many of you probably know from recent news stories, there is intense interest in the oil and gas resources that may lie beneath the Arctic ice. It will be a ten-year project, during which we will collect new data about the ocean floor and U.S. claims to these vital natural resources. We anticipate a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee later this month and a vote in the full Senate before the end of the year. We are hopeful that more than the required two-thirds of the Senate will support our joining the Convention.

This gives you a flavor of the issues we’re working on every day in the Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science. Now, I’d like to talk about our work to stop illegal wildlife trafficking. It is common knowledge that animal species are endangered around the world, and most of the time what people attribute the problem to is loss of habitat, loss of land, and human pressures that cause them.

But what people really don't know as much about, and what we're talking about today, is that animal species are threatened by the bounty on their head. The illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife products poses an even greater threat in some cases than the loss of natural habitat. And the numbers are really quite staggering. I can't give you every statistic this evening but I'll give you a few. First of all, the conservative estimate that we have is that the trade amounts to about $10 billion a year globally. Some estimates put it closer to $20 billion – only behind drugs and maybe weapons.

The estimates on the trade in live animals are staggering – first of all, probably 25,000-40,000 primates are traded per year some for pets, some for so called “bushmeat”. In other words some primates are slaughtered for food. Two to three million birds--live birds--are for sale per year. And the statistics on the wildlife products are even grimmer just a couple of examples; in Brazil, a national report said that 4 million wild animals are killed in Brazil every year for their body parts and at least three specimens are collected for every product that's actually sold and traded. So really the statistics don't capture the loss completely. Hundreds of thousands of wildlife parts are imported each year solely for medicinal use.

That's mostly traditional Chinese medicines and some other things. And the reason the numbers are so staggering is that the trade has become very profitable. Chinese populations are becoming more prosperous and thus can afford to pay high prices for these exotic items. I'll just give you a couple of examples of how much one of these products will glean.

A single Lear’s Macaw can be worth up to $60,000. A Golden Lion Tamarin is worth about $20,000 and a gram of coral snake venom can be worth about $30,000. The prices are driving more and more members of organized crime syndicates to engage in this black market, and it's really pushing a number of species to the brink of extinction. I'll cite one well-known example: the tiger. There is a relentless demand for tigers’ skins and body parts. And I'm sad to say that I'm looking out across the age groups represented here and I think at least some of you may see the extinction of all species of tiger from across the world. That would mirror what happened in America with the buffalo in the early 20th century.

The United States is working with India and China--and a lot of other countries – but India and China in particular – on this problem to see if we can turn it around. But the picture really isn't very encouraging. Tiger populations are plummeting. At the same time the price for the products and the tigers themselves increases. So we have kind of a vicious cycle going on here. Another example of the threats from wildlife trade was documented last year in an article in the New York Times magazine about African elephants.

In Uganda, a country that has been ravaged by war in the last several years, the following elephant behavior has been documented by biologists and others:

• A man was fatally gored by a young male at a park near a village
• A young Indian tourist was killed by a male elephant who pinned the tourist down with one knee and stabbed him with his tusks.
• Elephants were seen killing rhinos, never before seen in the wild.
• Elephants trampled huts and villages and then blockaded roads prohibiting humans from passing.

To quote from the article, “These were not isolated incidents. All across Africa, India and parts of southeast Asia, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings.”

A simple explanation of this behavior is that human populations are growing and destroying more and more elephant habitat. And that is no doubt true. But scientists are documenting that this violent elephant behavior goes well beyond traditional so-called “human-animal conflict.” They are calling it a “precipitous collapse of elephant culture.”

And they are attributing this violence largely to poaching, as well as to culling, habitat loss, and war. Poaching for elephant ivory has broken a species that has a deep sense of family and noted long-term memory. Scientists are actually coming to the conclusion that the killing has caused the surviving elephants to exhibit a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder up to now seen only in humans, especially survivors of war. Some of you may think that these conclusions are far-fetched and attribute too much human emotion to animals. But it is becoming clear that more and more scientists are putting credence in this theory.

Unfortunately, traffickers aren’t concerned with these stories. They are more concerned with their immediate profits. A trader apprehended in Vietnam, who was exporting King cobras to be used for food and medicine, summed up the attitude of many engaged in this illegal activity. When asked where he obtained his snakes, he answered that he got them from Laos and Cambodia, since in Vietnam “there are no more left.” When then asked what he would do when there were no more wild pythons in Cambodia and Laos, he replied, “we will find something else to trade.”

Wildlife trafficking also poses health threats, especially from diseases that can jump from animals to humans. You've heard about SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome]; you've heard about avian influenza; you may have heard about the Ebola virus. We know these diseases can easily spread to humans and they're also quite deadly. We have already seen that the illegal trade in wildlife can serve as yet another vector for avian influenza.

In October 2004, a Thai man was caught attempting to smuggle a couple of mountain hawk eagles that were infected with the H5N1 virus, the most serious strain so far of the avian influenza virus. He had them in his carry-on bags in Brussels. They were seized and euthanized.

And then two years ago in London, two parrots that were infected with the avian influenza virus were seized at Heathrow airport. So this is a real threat that we need to pay attention. It's going to take a major effort to crack down on illegal wildlife trafficking. And we in the U.S. recognize that it's going to require not only the efforts of governments but of nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and of the average American citizen as well.

And, given the challenges we face and the fact that they're not limited by national borders, I think we're going to be increasingly reliant on these partnerships in the future. That’s why the U.S. put together a partnership to fight wildlife trafficking, the Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking. It was created and launched here in the United States with the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Wild Aid. Today, we have 19 partners, including the governments of Australia, Canada, Chile, India, and the United Kingdom.

Since the founding of CAWT, we've helped create an enforcement network in the Association of South East Asian Nations, the ASEAN countries, that has helped them bring together their customs, their police, and their wildlife officials in a cooperative way.

In the past two years, the enforcement network has already won several victories in the fight against trafficking. One of the Network’s first cooperative efforts involved the governments of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia working together to successfully return to Indonesia 48 orangutans who had been illegally smuggled into Thailand from their native habitat. We are trying to expand our reach into other regions. You have all probably read about the tragic and brutal slaughter of the mountain gorillas in the Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest national national park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The U.S. Government recently provided half a million dollars in new funds to improve enforcement against the criminal activity by helping rangers better protect endangered wildlife in the Virunga. The United States is also committed to protecting sharks. The U.S. is working through regional fisheries management organizations and international organizations such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to secure shark management and conservation.

Earlier this year, we successfully proposed several species of critically endangered sawfish for listing on Appendix I of CITES. This effectively bans all trade in sawfish parts and fins. We also supported proposals by Germany to list spiny dogfish and porbeagle shark. At the United Nations General Assembly meeting starting today, the United States will be taking a leadership role and asking other countries to do more to protect sharks and to end the practice of shark finning. Most of the U.S. actions I have spoken about are designed to cut off the supply of these illegal products by improving enforcement. Now I want to talk about what you and others can do to stop the demand. Unfortunately, we have a problem right here in America, we are the second largest market, after China, for these illegal products. So one of the reasons I’m here with Bo Derek tonight is to create public awareness about the problem.

The high U.S. demand for these products seems to be coming largely from a lack of knowledge of what is legal and what isn’t – the tourist who can’t resist the black and red coral necklace or the turtle hair clip; the cowboy who just can’t resist the snake-skin boots, not knowing they are from an endangered species; or the aquarium enthusiast who just has to have the rarest of the rare reef fish for his tank.

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, the total annual declared value for U.S. wildlife imports and exports was approximately $1.6 billion for 2000-04. During that period, the U.S. processed approximately 135,000 wildlife shipments (approximately 34,000 per year). In those shipments, enforcement officials found violations in approximately 3,500 shipments per year, roughly 10%

We spent the morning with Fish and Wildlife officers at Miami International Airport. I can assure you these guys are working hard. Today we saw shipments of legal products African clawed frogs. But we also saw items seized earlier this year snow leopard skins, stuffed tigers, python skin boots. This is just a microcosm of what comes in to other ports in the United States.

We’ll continue to shine a spotlight on this illegal activity and to try to convince people that they don’t need to bring the coral necklaces, those tortoise shell hair clips, the Shahtoosh Shawls into the country. Americans really need to lead the world and stop buying these products. We need your help.

We are making progress, but we have a whole lot more work to do. To help raise awareness, I asked Bo Derek to come here tonight to ask for your help herself. You already know that she is Secretary Rice’s special envoy on global wildlife trafficking issues, but I want to say a little more about the work that she's done to protect animals, because it is clear that this interest comes straight from her heart. She served on a number of boards including the Galapagos Conservancy and WildAid. She's taken up the cause of stopping the slaughter of horses in the U.S. for food export, and she's testified before Congress with the National Horse Protection Coalition.

Given her interest and the public sense of service that she has displayed so strongly over the years, we thought she was a natural choice to help us with this issue of wildlife trafficking. So at this point I'd like to give her an opportunity to talk about her perspective on this issue.

Thank you.