The True Costs of Wildlife Trafficking

With the novel coronavirus out-break that has swept the planet in 2020, our relationship with wildlife and nature has come into sharp focus. Because this new coronavirus may have originated in a seafood and wildlife market in China, it has brought renewed attention to the issue of wildlife trade and the thousands of species that are illegally poached, bought, sold, and trafficked across the globe.

Driven by unrelenting demand, the wildlife trafficking that could have contributed to starting the coronavirus pandemic is having devastating impacts beyond posing grave biosafety and public health threats. For one, poaching, overfishing, and overharvesting is fast-tracking innumerable species toward imminent extinction. The scope of the plunder has impaired the healthy functioning of entire ecosystems. The illegal wildlife trade also funds transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups, abetted by governmental corruption that undermines the rule of law. Moreover, wildlife trafficking has become a national security concern for nations around the world. As a global issue, addressing the illicit wildlife trade will require a global effort.

The coronavirus pandemic is one of the most severe and immediate examples of the harms of wildlife trafficking. The coronavirus first emerged as a mysterious respiratory disease in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and was declared an outbreak on December 31. Within days, Chinese researchers identified it as a new coronavirus and named it 2019-CoV-2; the resulting disease was termed COVID-19.¹

For decades, we have heard dire warnings from epidemiologists and infectious disease experts, including Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance in New York, that markets similar to the one in Wuhan—that sell live and dead wildlife for food and traditional medicines—are dangerous breeding grounds for the next pandemic.² They are microbial petri dishes where species from across the globe are caged side-by-side, exchanging pathogens that can mutate and jump into new, vulnerable hosts that lack natural immunity to them. About 70 percent of the emerging diseases that infect humans are zoonotic, originating in animals.³ Nearly all zoonotic diseases originate in either mammal or bird hosts.

These markets are not unique to China: they are found across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Zoonotic diseases have emerged from the wildlife trade in many parts of the world, and many are deadly, including AIDS (transmitted by chimpanzees in Africa that were butchered by hunters), Ebola (spread by fruit bats to other forest animals in Africa), and Nipah virus (which jumped from flying foxes to pigs in Malaysia).⁴ In 2002–2003, SARS (spread from bats to civets, small nocturnal cat-like animals), the first coronavirus to originate in China, infected 8,098 people worldwide and killed 774.⁵ China temporarily closed its wildlife markets, but they were permitted to reopen when the crisis passed. COVID-19 most likely originated in bats and passed to an intermediary before infecting humans. That intermediary may have been the pangolin, a scaly endangered mammal native to Africa and Asia. Voracious demand for its scales and meat in China and East Asia has made it the world's most-trafficked mammal.⁶

As of late April 2020, more than 2.7 million COVID-19 cases were reported globally, with nearly 200,000 confirmed deaths.⁷ The pandemic had disrupted the social fabrics and economies of both developing and advanced nations, with schools, factories, and non-essential businesses shuttered, populations ordered to stay home, and travel bans in place. The International Monetary Fund anticipated "the worst economic fallout since the Great Depression."⁸ Potential economic fallout from the pandemic has been projected to be $2.7 trillion in lost global output—equaling the United Kingdom's GDP.⁹ But there are "few metrics to indicate how prolonged and expansive the economic effects may be," according to the Congressional Research Service.¹⁰

Amidst this latest epidemic, China's wildlife markets have again been shut down. The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress called for a prohibition on consumption of wildlife. However, the ruling included numerous loopholes that have raised concern, such as the exclusion...