Can Wild Animal Trading Be “Sustainable?”
Across the world, wild plants and animals are traded for food, medicine, hunting trophies, and as companions. This trade exists in both legal and illegal forms, and the practices that supply the trade are often damaging to the planet and can threaten the survival of wild populations. In this paper, researchers review the obstacles to what they view as a “sustainable wildlife trade,” as well as possible solutions.
One of the most basic problems is defining a “sustainable” trade. To really think about the sustainability of a population, we need to consider not just how many organisms are left in the wild, but the quality of the population and environment left behind. This lack of consideration threatens the existence of a wide variety of species. In countries like the U.S. and Canada, wild plants and animals are not legally owned by anyone, and are, in theory, a public trust. In reality, this is often forgotten when there is a market for a certain species. In these cases, trade can reach dangerous levels in the push for further profit.
This relates to another obstacle to the idea of sustainable trading: a lack of appropriately enforced regulations. “Sustainable” practices rely on legislation from governing bodies, but also participation from local communities. For example, the authors claim that the use of community-based conservation and resource management has helped the trade of yellow-spotted Amazon river turtles reach a point where it does not lead to active population decline.
People may have the impression that if trade is legal, it is also sustainable. Unfortunately, this is not the case. For example, technically legal domestic transactions are not always documented, which can lead to uncontrolled international trade. What’s more, properly documenting trade can be challenging, which makes it hard to know how many animals or plants are actually being transported. This can quickly add up to unsustainable levels of legal trade. Rare species in particular may be traded unsustainably due to a lack of monitoring.
Even when trade is regulated, there can be challenges to sustainability. Trade regulation is largely enforced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). CITES is an important tool and has a wide reach around the world. However, it has several shortcomings:
- A shortage of adequate data makes it difficult to create meaningful trade quotas.
- The quality of enforcement is rarely assessed and varies widely from country to country.
- Estimates of sustainability can be skewed by the stockpiling of traded species.
These three issues (and more) distort the evidence that CITES could use to make important judgments and decisions, allowing unsustainable trade to continue.
When CITES regulations are broken, customs officers or conservationists are often the ones who need to catch it. This means that illegal trading frequently goes under the radar. This can happen when traders can mislabel species, something that would be very difficult for a non-expert to catch.
Together, all of these factors have made scientists concerned about the rate of unsustainable trade, whether legal or not. Until we have better definitions, data, and practices, the authors say it will be hard for regulation to be enforced properly, and for us to even understand whether the trade of a given species is “sustainable” or not.
As public understanding of this issue increases and attitudes change, the authors point out that unsustainable trade is becoming more culturally unacceptable. Of course, that lack of cultural acceptance may not make much of an impact on the black market trade where social desirability is not a concern.
In order to decrease the rate of biodiversity decline, the authors claim we need a precautionary approach. This means making it the responsibility of traders and importers to prove that their practices are sustainable. In doing so, we can develop a better system that makes it harder to threaten the existence of a species for profit. We also need to take the survival of specific species seriously before they are at risk of extinction, not only as a result. It is important that decision-makers fully understand the damaging effects of the wild animal and plant trade — this will be more possible through better data and regulations.
Of course, this paper ignores the ethics of the wild animal trade. Many animal advocates ethically object to the trading of animals, regardless of whether it is deemed sustainable. While continuing to highlight the moral implications of trading wild animals and treating them as commodities, advocates can use the ideas raised in this paper to argue for a reduction in the number of animals traded, and therefore the suffering that occurs as a result. They can also push for changes to regulations that will require those trading wild animals to prove that their practices are sustainable, thus making it harder for trade to take place.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.117987