By Kira Walker
In September, customs authorities at Cairo International Airport seized 17 endangered falcons. The following month, a man was caught smuggling a cobra in his hand luggage on a flight from Cairo to Kuwait, forcing an emergency landing. And most recently, in January, customs authorities confiscated two shipments of ivory at the airport.
These latest confiscations are a smaller piece of a much larger, problematic picture: the increased demand for “exotic” wildlife in Egypt, and around the world, is fueling the illicit trade of wildlife.
In recent years, the world has witnessed a dramatic spike in the illegal trade of wildlife. It is an incredibly lucrative business, worth an estimated US$19 billion, on a scale comparable to drug trafficking, arms trafficking and human trafficking, yet it receives a fraction of the attention.
CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, is tasked with setting the global controls for trade of endangered wildlife and wildlife parts. Countries that ratify the treaty are then responsible for monitoring and enforcing its regulations. With 178 member states, CITES is the largest international conservation treaty in the world.
Egypt has been a signatory to CITES since 1978, but its long track record of flagrant violations leaves little room to deny that Egypt has played, and continues to play, a complicit role in this growing illegal trade.
Ivory and apes
Faced with dwindling elephant populations across Africa and Asia, an international ban on the trade of ivory was established in 1990. But Egypt’s history as an important center for ivory trading and carving goes back thousands of years.
Consequently, more than 30 years after the ban, Egypt remains Africa’s third-largest illegal market for ivory, as cited in a January 2012 TRAFFIC report on illegal ivory in Egypt.
The ivory arrives in the workshops of craftsmen, centered in Khan al-Khalili souq, after being smuggled into the country through Sudan, and is often traced back to Kenya, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire, in addition to Sudan, the report notes.
Even more concerning, the report found, is that since the revolution, the situation has deteriorated. A lack of law enforcement created a security vacuum enabling the illegal ivory trade to once again flourish.
Previously, top buyers of ivory products from Egypt were of Spanish, Italian and American origin. Now, however, Chinese buyers account for more than 50 percent of illegal ivory sold in Egypt, a trend that mirrors the alarming rise in demand from East Asia for wildlife and wildlife products, long revered for their medicinal and spiritual use. More....