Not all trade in wildlife is harmful – in fact the opposite can be true
By JAMES FAIR
The chances are you don’t consider yourself a consumer of wildlife products. You might forage a few autumn fruits and fungi, but you’re not part of an annual legal trading market worth a staggering $220 billion (£182 billion) a year – or, indeed, complicit in the illegal one, estimated at anywhere between £6-19 billon.
The chances are you’re wrong about that. Bought any fish recently? Or anything made of wood? They are both wildlife products.
Alternatively, open up your food cupboard – what do you see? Have you got any marshmallows or soft drinks? They probably contain gum arabic, the hardened sap of an acacia tree that grows in semi-desert areas of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent. Most of the world’s gum arabic comes from Sudan, where it is a major economic activity for more than 10 per cent of the population. The substance is also used in pharmaceuticals, paint, glass manufacturing, textiles, and the weapons and fireworks industries.
There are plenty of other common products harvested from wild plants. Brazil nuts, ginseng and liquorice are all obtained from the wild, as are lesser-known products such as jatamansi, a plant rhizome harvested in Nepal (see box on p64).
Anastasiya Timoshyna, from the wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC, says the public debate over how humans use wild species and whether it is good for their long-term conservation is rarely depicted in its full complexity.
“There are a lot of very black-and-white discussions in the media about it, and it’s because people see big headlines and a lot of conversations about the illegal wildlife trade and wildlife crime and how they affect both species and people negatively,” she says. “The reality is that most trade in wild species is a) legal and b) likely to be sustainable.”
That said, she concedes there are often question marks around sustainability, and clearly that is a particular issue for fisheries.
But – for argument’s sake – taking timber, other plants and fisheries out of the equation, what about wild animals? This is more clear-cut: the demand for products such as rhino horn and elephant ivory, made into bogus health products and unnecessary trinkets, is responsible for the unsustainable and brutal killing of some of the world’s most charismatic mammals. The exploitation of wild animals is always wrong, surely.
Well, no. Just b
