U.S Annual Trade of Wildlife Trafficling : Before World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and a packed house of more than 300 corruption investigators, he called the illegal $20-billion US annual trade “one of the most insidious forms of corruption and criminality in the world today.” “It distorts economic development, undermines the rule of law and fuels sources of conflict,” he said. “Unchecked, it can be a factor in spreading infectious diseases with a devastating toll.” Over the last decade, wildlife crime has “mutated from low-level opportunist crime to large-scale activity by international criminal networks” that have taken advantage of global transportation networks to increase the trade, he said. He cited statistics from Interpol that show 17 seizures by customs in 2011 netted 27,000 kilos of ivory, which is equivalent to the tusks of at least 3,000 elephants. Poaching has increase to mega-numbers. In South Africa the number of rhinos killed in 2012 was more than 600, compared with only 13 in 2007. In 2013, poachers killed more than 20,000 elephants in all of Africa, a rate that now exceeds the birth rate. He also noted that the illegal trade in exotic species has reduced the number of tigers to a mere 3,200.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 19:03:35 +0000
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