June 19, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 7, 1423

LONDON: Mafia groups and drug cartels are moving into illegal trade in wildlife products, a new report reveals.

The report, ‘International Wildlife Trade and Organized Crime’, released on Monday by the World Wildlife Foundation, WWF, says that organized criminal gangs — including the Russian mafia — are using existing smuggling routes for wildlife products, arms, drugs, and even for smuggling people.

An earlier report from the WWF had indicated that many wildlife smugglers were getting away with their crime because of lax laws. “The new report points to the people behind wildlife crimes,” Anthony Fields of the WWF said.

The report says that half the wildlife criminals prosecuted in Britain last year have previous convictions for drugs, violence, theft and firearms offences. The WWF says the trend seen in Britain is likely to be a global pattern.

The report says that “in Brazil, recent estimates suggest that up to 40 per cent of illegal drug shipments are combined with wildlife.” The United States Fish and Wildlife Service has reported that more than a third of cocaine seized in the US in 1993 was associated with wildlife imports.

In the same year a US Customs inspector in Miami noticed an unnatural bulge in a live boa constrictor which was part of a shipment of 312 animals from Colombia. An investigation revealed that cocaine-filled condoms had been forcibly inserted into 225 of the snakes. A total of 39 kgs of cocaine was recovered from the reptiles, all of which died.

An example of the kind of mafia behind the smuggling of wildlife products is Russian mafia gangs behind caviar smuggling, the report says. These gangs are heavily armed and have boats faster than any of those belonging to the Russian authorities. These gangs extract caviar from Sturgeon fish and sell it to Western markets at a very high price.

Stuart Chapman, head of the species programme at WWF, said: “This report confirms what many have suspected. The huge profits that can be made from wildlife trafficking are acting as a magnet to organized crime networks. The profits, sometimes worth up to 800 per cent.”

The study identifies three actions needed to combat organized, illegal wildlife trade in Britain: identify illicit markets; identify people and networks within the criminal organizations, and hinder criminals by creating stronger legislation, enhanced enforcement and closing legal loopholes.

The global trade in animals, plants and their by-products has been estimated at 159 billion dollars a year based on declared import values. But the extent of illegal trade is “notoriously difficult to estimate,” the report says.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.