A recent complaint by the European Commission (EC) reveals that the improper marketing of varieties of flora and fauna at risk of extinction - considered one of the most revealing illegal maneuvers in the world - would be linked to the financing of subversive actions in the African region.
The European Commissioner for the Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Karmenu Vella, has declared that the criminal gangs dedicated to this trade move between 8,000 and 20,000 million euros each year. Apart from constituting an attack on the survival of the species, it intensifies corruption, deprives poor communities of indispensable income and even causes human victims. He explained that the most requested specimens in Europe are reptiles, snakes, chameleons or iguanas.
For the EC "it endangers the security of central Africa, where militias and terrorist groups partially pay for their activities thanks to the trafficking of species." The European Union is a transit zone for many animals between Africa and Asia. The statistics are alarming: in 2014 approximately 20,000 elephants and 1,200 rhinos were killed, genera that are in an accelerated process of population decline. Due to this business, the number of tigers has decreased from 100,000 to less than 3,500 in a century.
At the discretion of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) - signed in Washington on March 3, 1973 and administered by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) - this harmful action clandestine mobilizes annually between five to seven billion dollars. It is the third irregular operation of notable global dimension after the sale of arms and drug trafficking.
Our capital is one of the scenes of illicit exchange on the continent. Shipments arrive from other countries and, mainly, from Iquitos and Pucallpa, cities designated as exit hubs to various parts of the world. The highest demand is in Europe, Japan and the United States. Its acquisition generates the destruction of its natural environment and decreases its population with incalculable environmental, economic and social consequences.
On the other hand, I wish to comment on the case of the controversial specimen seller Jean de Coninck, a dangerous Belgian exporter in the 1970s. Traffic from Belgium (entity of the World Wide Fund for Nature - WWF) warned that from his business registered as Kingbirds Western it supplied collectors through advertisements in the specialized magazine International Zoo News, among others.
According to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), he participated in a covert conspiracy of primates, leopards and tapirs taken from Laos, to the Bangkok airport (Thailand), to Belgium. In 1979, he was accused by the Secretary General of the Cites, Peter Sand, when he was managing his residence in Peru. That year Coninck declared to the press: "… That due to the increasingly strict legislation that regulates its activities in Europe, it will soon transfer its trade to Peru."
In the same way, Felipe Benavides denounced him for trying to bribe the head of the Animal Department of the Parque de Las Leyendas (1987). Despite these documented questions, national officials granted licenses to their companies De Coninck EIRL and Perubel SA, as well as for a farm. However, according to the information published on the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) portal, the Lima Technical Forestry and Wildlife Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture has imposed on this sordid character the highest penalty for a crime of this kind. nature: a fine of 28,500 new soles for the possession of eight cock-of-the-rocks.
This beautiful ornithological genus is protected by our regulations: its capture, sale and export are prohibited. The male is bright orange in color and has a fan-shaped crest, while the female is a gray-brown hue. It lives in the Andean cloud forests and its name comes from nesting in the rocks. On the black market it can cost $ 5,000,000.
It is important to clarify the risks of this surreptitious task of unpredictable dimensions. The confiscated animals perish due to the change of habitat, inconveniences in their feeding or epidemics; its massive extraction destroys the ecosystem with irreversible consequences; about 25 percent of the planet's mammals are liable to disappear; in South America, stealth trading exceeds 10 million dollars a year; between 50 to 80 percent of the specimens transported secretly die on the way.
Wildlife has an invaluable environmental, cultural, scientific and educational value that merits a demanding legal framework aimed at guaranteeing its adequate conservation. Even more so taking into account the extraordinary biodiversity of our territory. It is imperative to develop strategies for their preservation, management and rational use for the benefit of native groups, whose high rates of extreme poverty induce them to prey on our prodigious ecological heritage. A clear indication is migratory agriculture, which constitutes one of the main causes of deforestation in our Amazon.
In this sense, to face this problem, a more intense institutional coordination must be established at the local, regional and global level; promote the permanent training of customs and airport personnel; update and standardize our laws, according to international regulations; establish export quotas and design a concerted policy regarding these natural resources. It is essential to incorporate indigenous groups in these efforts.
There is an irrefutable parallel commitment between the exporting states and the nations that crave these highly valued species. In this regard, I share the prescient words of the Peruvian environmentalist Felipe Benavides, who served as vice president of the Cites Standing Committee: "The indiscriminate killing of animals generally occurs for the benefit of highly industrialized nations, which consume hides, wool, ivory, oil, etc., in the luxury market. The pressure put on the poacher comes from the luxury demand of a few. We cannot, however, entirely blame foreign merchants and consumers, since much of the responsibility for the persecution and destruction of animal life falls on the authorities of the Third World.
(*) Teacher, conservationist, consultant on environmental issues, member of the Life Institute and former president of the Board of Trustees of Parque de Las Leyendas - Felipe Benavides Barreda.
