Illegal traders going ape over big primates

WHILE the Cites Secretariat maintains there is only a “limited” trade in chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans stolen from the diminishing forests of Africa and Asia, a new report released this week shows that illegal trade is surging.

The Secretariat infor med delegates that a global wildlife crime report, released in May this year, had shown a limited illegal trade in great apes. But a UN environment programme (Unep) representative said: “We take exception to the conclusion that the illegal trade in great apes is limited.”

This week, a new apes seizure database was released at Cites by Grasp (the Great Apes Survival Partnership), in partnership with Unep, which showed there were more than 1 800 great ape seizures in the past decade. Seizures were recorded in 23 nations, almost half of which were non-range states from Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

More than 90 percent of all seizures occurred within national borders and were therefore not recorded in widely-used illegal trade databases managed by the Cites and other regulatory agencies.

As a result, the trade in endangered and critically endangered great apes was dramatically under-reported.

Grasp published Stolen Apes in 2013, which revealed how three out of every four great ape seizures happened with national borders and were not recorded in international trade databases.

“Any illegal trade in great apes – whether it crosses international borders or not – needs to be considered a very real threat to the survival of these endangered species,” said Unep Environment executive director Erik Solheim.

“I visited Borneo recently and saw for myself the incredible pressure orangutans are under from habitat loss, and African apes are equally stressed. Illegal trade can only push them all that much closer to extinction, and it needs to be stopped.”

Unep said two great apes were being seized a week, which showed far more great apes were being traded than were seized, which represented huge losses to wild populations. It also said there was growing trade in trophies, with 262 ape skulls seized in 2014, for example. – Sheree Bega