The world must clamp down hard on the illegal global wildlife trade, the head of the United Nations environment agency warned Sunday, calling it a multibillion-dollar criminal business that is threatening to wipe out some of the planet’s most iconic species.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, made the call during the opening meeting of the 178-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Bangkok. He cited the massive upsurge in poaching of Africa’s endangered elephants and rhinos, whose slaughter — the worst in two decades — is being driven by rising demand in Asia for their tusks and horns.
“The backdrop against which this meeting takes place should be a very serious wakeup call for all of us,” Steiner told some 2,000 delegates assembled at a convention center in the Thai capital.
Wildlife trafficking “in a terrible way has become a trade and a business of enormous proportions — a billion-dollar trade in wildlife species that is analogous to that of the trade in drugs and arms,” Steiner said. “This is not a small matter. It is driven by a conglomerate of crime syndicates across borders.”
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