Despite
Reforms, The Territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal
parts.
By Charles
Homans New York Times 2/12/19
HONG KONG —
It was after dark on a Tuesday evening in December 2017 when the vans pulled
onto Island House Lane, a placid side street of residential complexes and
community garden plots in the suburban Tai Po district.
High-rises
gave way to lush forest as the street wound down to a pebble beach. Across the
harbor was Tolo Channel, and jagged green hills descending into the sea all the
way to the coast of China’s Guangdong province.
On the
water, a speedboat was waiting. Men began unloading the vans’ cargo onto the
beach.
When
officers from Hong Kong’s Customs and Excise Department arrived, the boats fled
out to sea. Marine officers pursued
them for two hours before losing them in the channel’s warren
of rocky coves and mangrove estuaries.
From the
vans, however, officers were able to recover part of the contraband cargo.
There were
about $1 million worth of mobile phones, digital cameras and tablets. And, packed
into cardboard boxes, the agents discovered more than 300
kilograms of smooth brown scales, each a couple inches across, that looked like
they had been stripped from some prehistoric reptile.
In fact,
they came from pangolins: a housecat-sized, forest-dwelling mammal that
resembles an armor-clad anteater. Pangolin meat is a delicacy in southern
China, where it is critically endangered, and its scales are prized as an
ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.
Over the
past decade, the animal has been hunted out of most of its range in Southeast
Asia, and it is being poached at alarming levels in Central Africa. The
pangolin’s value has increased with its rarity — the shipment seized in Tai Po
had a street value of around $300,000.
In the
geography of the illegal wildlife trade, Hong Kong occupies a unique and
essential position. It is a city that has built its reputation and economy as a
frictionless connector of countries and capital, located on the doorstep of
mainland China — the most ravenous wildlife market in the world.
Over the
past decade, the appetites of segments of the booming Chinese middle and upper
class — for jewelry, artwork, traditional (though often scientifically
uncreditable) remedies and exotic foods — have dramatically expanded a global
wildlife black market that has decimated species in Africa, Southeast Asia and
elsewhere.
The pangolin
is the latest casualty: Four of the eight species are now endangered, and the
international trade in pangolin products has been banned since 2016.
Researchers
at the ADM Capital Foundation, a Hong Kong-based organization focused on
environmental issues, recently analyzed data on seizures of wildlife products
from the Customs and Excise Department.
Between 2013
and 2017, Hong Kong seized 43 metric tons of pangolin scales and carcasses —
representing tens of thousands of animals — in shipments arriving from six
countries, principally Cameroon and Nigeria.
The amount
intercepted between 2013 and 2015 alone is equivalent to 45 percent of all the
pangolin products seized worldwide between 2007 and 2015, according to the most
recent figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The pangolin
products appear to have been mostly destined for mainland China — though they
are not hard to find in Hong Kong, either. On the well-trafficked Queen’s Road
in the Sheung Wan district, the clerk at one small shop, presiding over a
counter piled with dried goji berries, almonds and mung beans, readily offered
pangolin scales to an inquiring customer.
“We sell a
lot, and we’ve been doing this business for a long time,” she said. One liang —
a Chinese measure equal in Hong Kong to about 37.5 grams — retailed for 300
Hong Kong dollars, about $38. “It’s quite luxurious,” she said.
While the
shop was careful not to keep the product on the premises, she said that with a
phone call it could be delivered in half an hour, and getting it across the
border undetected was easy.
“We’ll just
grind it into powder,” she said. In order to avoid getting caught, she advised,
“don’t get too much at one time.”
A pipeline
for illegal trade
In recent
years, as alarm has grown about both the ecological consequences of the illegal
wildlife trade and its links to other forms of crime and security threats, many
countries have significantly stepped up their response, stiffening laws and
increasing the resources dedicated to enforcing them.
In the
United States, wildlife trafficking is now often prosecuted under muscular
organized-crime statutes. The U.N. describes the trade in wildlife as “one of
the largest transnational organized criminal activities.”
Hong Kong
stands out against this trend, conservationists here charge. While other
countries with the political and law-enforcement capacity to fight wildlife
trafficking have begun to do so, the territory’s government — which is
otherwise relatively aggressive in combating corruption, organized crime and
other ills — has appeared reluctant to follow suit, even as an enormous share
of the illegal trade passes through the territory’s airport and shipping
terminals.
The
territory’s Customs and Excise Department estimates the wildlife contraband it
has seized over the past five years — by value, principally pangolin, elephant
ivory and timber — to be worth more than $71 million, a figure that suggests
the possibility of a billion-dollar illicit industry.
But
environment and law-enforcement officials routinely reject the notion that
these seizures suggest the existence of serious criminal enterprises. “We do
not have very strong evidence that organized crime is organizing” the Hong Kong
wildlife trade, said Tse Chin-wan, Hong Kong’s under secretary for the
environment, in an interview in August.
Fewer than
20 percent of the seizures of pangolin products that A.D.M.C.F. identified
resulted in prosecutions. (According to the Customs and Excise Department, no
charges have been filed yet in the speedboat smuggling case in December 2017.)
Cases involving ivory — the largest segment of Hong Kong’s illegal wildlife
seizures by value, with $26.3 million worth seized from 2013 to 2017 — were
more likely to be prosecuted.
But arrests
were rarely made above the level of the individual couriers, known as “ant
smugglers,” who were caught red-handed at the airport and generally received
little more than a few weeks in prison and modest fines.
The official
reluctance to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade is explained in part by
the territory’s long history as perhaps the world’s premier entrepôt for legal
wildlife products. The city is culturally and physically adjacent to Guangdong
province, a center of traditional Chinese medicine and ivory craftsmanship for
centuries, where the consumption of wildlife for food is also deeply ingrained.
Hong Kong is
also close to Fujian province, a coastal region famous for its carving
industry, where many illegal wildlife products — rhinoceros horn, helmeted
hornbill crests, rosewood — are turned into high-end jewelry, knickknacks and
statuary for the Chinese market.
Hong Kong’s
century as a British territory gave it connections to merchants in the former
African colonies who traded in elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn and animal skins
prized by consumers around the world. The city was the center of the
international ivory trade until it was banned in 1989, importing as much as 700
tons of tusks from Africa annually at its 1970s peak.
For years,
Hong Kong has been a leading importer and exporter of shark fins — a popular
soup ingredient in Cantonese cuisine. By the most recent available statistics,
the territory leads the world in imports of live fish and reptiles.
Much of this
legal trade is visible in neighborhoods like the commercial district of Sheung
Wan, where storefronts crammed with dried sea horses and birds’ nests crowd the
street beneath billboards of the Kardashians.
Conservationists
charge that this legal commerce complicates efforts to tackle Hong Kong’s role
as a key node in the global illegal trade. Once they are skinned and dried for
sale, the fins of the endangered scalloped hammerhead shark, for instance, are
almost impossible to distinguish from the fins of legally caught blue sharks in
Hong Kong’s seafood shops.
Among the
dried fish swim bladders — also a popular soup ingredient — hanging in the same
shop windows, it is similarly difficult to distinguish the sustainably caught
species from the swim bladders of the totoaba, a critically endangered fish
whose illegal harvest off the Pacific Coast of Mexico has also pushed the
vaquita, a porpoise that is often caught in fishing nets, to the edge of
extinction.
The massive
growth of the shipping industry and global connectivity have made the markets
for these species ruthlessly efficient and fast-moving. “I’m wondering, what’s
the next species?” said Timothy C. Bonebrake, a biologist at the University of
Hong Kong’s conservation forensics laboratory, which assists local law
enforcement in analyzing wildlife contraband.
“Is there a
way you can be proactive about this and stop it before these things are all
critically endangered? And certainly, in Hong Kong, we’re seeing there is
always a new species, all the time.”
‘The world
is changing’
Efforts to
patrol Hong Kong’s wildlife imports are also hampered by the sheer scale of
commerce in a territory whose economy was built on unencumbered movement.
Most of the
seized pangolin scales have turned up in shipping containers in Hong Kong’s
port, the fifth largest in the world, where inspecting more than a sliver of
the nearly 21 million containers that pass through annually would be a
herculean task.
Ivory and
rhino horn from Africa increasingly arrive through Hong Kong’s international
airport, which leads the world in airfreight and is the eighth most-trafficked
by passengers.
“We’re
serious about enforcement and prosecution,” said Mr. Tse, the environment under
secretary. “But we have to accept the reality that Hong Kong is a free port,
and it offers a lot of opportunities for this kind of activity to happen. Every
day we have tens of thousands of cargos going in and going out of the city.”
Mr. Tse
argues that in the face of these daunting challenges, the best hope for
reducing Hong Kong’s role in the illegal wildlife trade is reducing local
consumer demand for legal products. He points to the territory’s consumption of
shark fins, imports of which fell 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.
“I think the
community has begun to accept that if something is not good for the
environment, it should be phased out,” he said. “The world is changing.”
Hong Kong
has also made some moves to address its role as a wildlife-shopping destination
for consumers from mainland China, where the appetite for wildlife products
shows little sign of abating.
In 2018,
Hong Kong took the significant step of banning
the sale of ivory, following similar moves by China and the
United States two years before. It was a momentous change, and a recognition
that while the city is important to the ivory trade, the ivory trade is no
longer very important to the city or its residents.
The busy Nathan
Road shopping district, which was crammed with ivory shops as recently as the
1980s, is now mostly given over to outposts of international luxury brands.
“There’s no reason why we have to focus on ivory here,” Mr. Tse said.
Since the
international trade was banned in 1989, Hong Kong traders have been allowed to
sell their stocks of pre-ban ivory — and for years, conservationists, citing
that stockpile’s suspiciously slow depletion, argued that traders were using it
to launder ivory from freshly killed elephants.
Some ivory
sellers readily admit that such sleight-of-hand occurred, blaming unscrupulous
traders while casting themselves as collateral damage in the struggle to
contain the illegal wildlife trade.
“Sly and
dishonest businessmen, they make it difficult for us,” said Leung Shun-cheung,
who with his sister, Leung Yun-tim, runs the Hang Cheong Ivory Factory, a small
shop on Queen’s Road. “They use the smuggled ivory to fill the space in their
quota for legal ivory. That’s how they did it. But we are innocent.”
On an early
evening in August, Mr. Leung was crouched over a workbench in the shop, sanding
a pair of ivory chopsticks he had carved, while Ms. Leung sorted through bills
at a nearby desk. The bare fluorescent light bulbs illuminated dusty glass
shelves packed full of ivory carvings, but no customers.
“Because of
the ban, we don’t have much business,” Ms. Leung said. “From time to time, the
locals come here to buy a small piece.” She said that in three years, when the
domestic ban goes into effect, they intended to close their shop, which their
father opened before World War II.
Mr. Leung
produced a sheaf of letters he had received from the Agriculture, Fisheries and
Conservation Department, advising him of the 2021 deadline and offering to enroll
him in training for a new career. He was 72 years old, and had only ever worked
in the ivory shop.
“The
government is asking me to retire at the age of 75,” he said, laughing grimly.
“They’re very concerned about me.”
He settled
the chopsticks in a display case: two slender increments of supply awaiting a
demand that remained vast, but for the moment, out of reach.
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