Traffickers now use online platforms to sell wildlife items
Bangkok. Traffickers have now switched to online platforms to sell wildlife products from African countries, including Tanzania, to some buyers who are mostly based in Asian countries.
The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network (Traffic) senior project officer for wildlife traps, Ms Monica Zavagli, said here that every day traffickers were getting smarter and smarter to trade in ivory, rhino horns and other products. This makes it difficult to trace them.
She made the remarks at the Journalists Exchange Programme (JEP) meeting between Tanzanian and Thailand writers.
Funded by the USaid Worldlife Asia, the JEP is implemented by a US-based independent, non-profit research, development and technical services institute known as RTI International in conjunction with the Journalists Environmental Association of Tanzania (Jet).
“Traffickers are now using key words to refer to some wildlife products. Normally, they use closed groups to communicate.
“Instead of using real word and name of the product they use emojis or icons to refer to these words,” she said.
Emoji is a small image, either static or animated, that represents a facial expression, an entity or a concept in technology and digital communications.
She said Tanzania was still used as a consolidation point (or an export point) of wildlife trafficking to some other destination.
She said traffickers were also using the great lakes region for transporting wildlife products.
“In Tanzania, through the Port of Dar es Salaam, we have not seen any seizures made since 2015, but we have seen some seizures in other regions of the country which indicates that Tanzania is used as a consolidation or export point to trade wildlife animals,” she revealed.
According to a report titled ‘Elephants in the dust: The African Elephant Crisis,’ increasing poaching levels, as well as loss of habitat were threatening the survival of African elephant populations in Central Africa as well as previously secure populations in West, Southern and Eastern Africa.
The report - produced by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and ‘Traffic’ - says that systematic monitoring of large-scale seizures of ivory destined for Asia is indicative of the involvement of criminal networks, which are increasingly active and entrenched in the trafficking of ivory between Africa and Asia.
It recommends critical actions to improve law enforcement across the entire illegal ivory supply chain and strengthening national legislative frameworks.
