CONTRABAND CULTURE
HONG KONG AT CROSSROADS OF CRIMINAL WILDLIFE TRADE
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 was about $1 million worth of mobile phones, digital cameras and tablets. And, packed into cardboard boxes, the agents discovered more than 300 kilograms (more than 660 pounds) of smooth brown scales, each a couple of inches across, that looked as if they had been stripped from some prehistoric reptile.
In fact, they came from pangolins: a housecat-size, 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.
During 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.
In a report published last month by the Hong Kong Wildlife Trade Working Group, a consortium that includes the foundation, the researchers found that the territory accounted for more pangolin seizures than any country.
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.
Although the data analyzed by the foundation does not include 2018, pangolin seizures nearly doubled from 2017 to 2018. In January 2019, Hong Kong authorities intercepted the territory’s largestever shipment of pangolin scales, 9 tons in all, on a cargo ship bound to Vietnam from Nigeria.
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 United Nations 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 billiondollar 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 undersecretary for the environment, in an interview in August.
Fewer than 20 percent of the seizures of pangolin products that ADMCF 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
‘THE WORLD IS CHANGING’
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.”
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 Tse, the environment undersecretary. “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.”
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.” of live fish and reptiles.