It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic for us to ban the wildlife trade, but we have to make sure that this one sticks.
Desperately searching for a silver lining to the current Coronavirus pandemic? A widespread resurgence in calls to ban the trade in wildlife and wildlife products should be one of them. Although whether this translates into long-lasting action is a question that our Governments alone can answer.
Conservationists and animal lovers alike have long searched for motivational narratives that can convince the less conscientious members of society of the need to protect wildlife populations around the globe. Where videos of elephants grieving for their dead fell short, statistics were used; quantifying a wild animal by means of its ability to contribute to the local economy, or publishing vast percentages - such as the 60% of global wildlife populations that humans have wiped off the earth over the past 50 years - to expose our seemingly toxic impact on the natural world.
However, despite this poignant imagery and devastating data, it is sadly the recent Coronavirus pandemic that has laid bare the most compelling narrative of all; if we don’t place a global ban on the illegal and unregulated trade in wildlife and wildlife products (IUTWWP), our efforts towards sustainable development will be compromised and not even the wealthiest in our societies will be able to escape the consequences. As Governments in Asia have begun to bow to pressure to put an end to the wildlife trade, we must ensure that such temporary measures result in long-lasting and binding global policies if we want to prevent a pandemic like this from ever happening again.
Even for the most wilfully ignorant amongst the climate denial movement, it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that humans need nature to survive. From the medicines we use, to the food we eat, the homes we build and the Ocean and forests that regulate our environment, nature is - and always has been - integral to human survival. It is what made us who we are, and enabled modern humans to emerge from the planes of East Africa over 50,000 years ago. It is also what will ultimately ensure our survival, provided we learn from our multiple misguided attempts to overcome it. In spite of having named an entire ecological epoch after ourselves, mankind’s ability to shape our natural environment should not be held up as a badge of evolutionary honour. It is instead, a stark reminder that humans - like every other past and living species on earth - are a function of the ecosystems in which we exist. It is the role that we chose to play in those ecosystems that will determine our future survival on the planet that we call home.
The consequences of ecosystem disruption have become abundantly and shockingly clear over the past few months. The early warning signs - deemed by the more anthropomorphic amongst environmental commentators to have come from Mother Nature herself - started with a series of devastating wildfires, floods, mass coral bleachings and freak weather events. However, it is the emergence of Coronavirus that has demonstrated how far-reaching the effects of human interference with the natural environment can be, especially in a globalised world. And whilst there is some debate as to how exactly the Coronavirus leapt from animals to humans, and indeed whether it even originated in the Huanan ‘wet market’ in Wuhan, there is little doubt that the emergence of the current pandemic is a direct consequence of human behaviour.
This is not the first time that such so-called ‘Zoonotic' diseases have jumped from animals to humans, with SARS, MERS, EBOLA and HIV/AIDS perhaps being the most well-known recent examples. Sadly, nor will it be the last. The emergence of Zoonotic diseases - which account for more than 6 out of every 10 known infections diseases in humans - have long been regarded as a direct result of human interaction with (and consumption of) wild animals. As humans increasingly act to reduce the natural barriers between virus host animals and themselves, experts have argued that the Coronavirus pandemic may just be the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the inevitable continued emergence of zoonotic diseases from wild animals in Asian wet markets and urban markets across West and Central Africa, one just has to consider the millennia-old pathogens that are currently preserved beneath melting polar ice caps - against which modern humans have little to no immunity - to recognise the scale of the problem that we might be facing. Indeed, Barack Obama is said to have been so concerned about the threat to humanity posed by the next pandemic that in 2017 his officials attempted to brief the incoming Trump administration about a hypothetical scenario not dissimilar to the one we are experiencing today. Of the Trump administration officials present during the meeting, about 66% no longer serve in the White House.
From a wildlife perspective, the response to the outbreak of COVID-19 has so far been tentatively encouraging. In response to international pressure, officials in China moved to place a ban on the farming and consumption of ‘terrestrial wildlife of important ecological, scientific and social value’ in early February. As one of the primary countries in which demand for wildlife products is fuelling the ongoing illegal wildlife trade across the globe, this is a positive step. Vietnam too has made moves to follow suit, with Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc tasking his Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) with formulating directives to ban the trade and consumption of wildlife, and submit them to the government for review by April 1. However, this is not the first time that such a ban has been put in place, and previous precedent should give us some cause for concern; after the SARS (Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus killed hundreds of people in China and Hong Kong in 2002-03, a similar ban was enacted by Chinese authorities, only to be subsequently lifted once the immediate threat of the disease had passed.
Indeed, you only have to look at the loopholes in China's current ban - such as the trade in wild animals for medicine, pets and scientific research - to recognise how futile this temporary gesture may turn out to be. In a devastatingly ironic twist, the Chinese Government recently approved the use of an injection (Tan Re Qing) that contains bear bile to treat Coronavirus, the production of which involves a truly horrific process of confinement and extraction from captive bears across China, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea. Where such loopholes persist and enable the ongoing use of wildlife products in traditional medicine, there can be little cause for celebration.
It is clear that - without a global agreement to implement and legislate for a total ban on the IUTWWP - this problem will persist, with consequences only too familiar to all of us who have been affected by COVID-19. There was some hope that these issues might have finally been addressed at the now-postponed Convention on Biological Diversity COP15 meeting initially scheduled to take place in Kunming, China in October 2020 . It remains to be seen when this event will take place, and whether ambition will be have been sufficiently raised as a result of the current pandemic.
Finally, it is worth addressing one central and often ignored facet of the climate and ecological crisis and the health emergencies that it creates; the disproportionate impact that it has on those who are least responsible for its proliferation. Whilst many have bulked at the portrayal of social distancing as being a ‘Western privilege’, you only have to look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo to recognise the salience of that statement. Having celebrated discharging their last known ebola patient on 3rd March - at which point the 42 day countdown towards announcing the end of the world’s second deadliest Ebola epidemic began - the DRC recorded it’s first known case of Coronavirus a mere seven days later. Clearly the biodiversity crisis has serious and devastating consequences not only for global health, but also for sustainable development, which cannot be achieved when meagre resources are being directed towards health emergencies such as that which we are experiencing today.
In the context of the illegal wildlife trade it is arguable that those who are fuelling the demand for wildlife and wildlife products are most responsible for the destruction of biodiversity that it is causing. Especially when you consider that many of those who work tirelessly to supply the seemingly irrepressible demand coming out of Asia, have little option other than to continue hunting wildlife if they want to provide for themselves and their families.
We therefore have to ensure that approaches to banning the wildlife trade are equitable - and sensitive towards the cultural and social contexts in which the trade occurs - in order to have a long-lasting, positive effect on ecological and global health. A reactionary and complete ban on the trading and consumption of wildlife would devastate the livelihoods of countless people across the globe, whilst a global clamp down on bush and wet markets such as those in Wuhan, would remove access to food sources for hundreds of millions of people. A refusal to acknowledge and account for this reality will likely drive the wildlife trade underground into less regulated and more dangerous spaces, with potentially even more catastrophic consequences for global health.
The Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare once and for all how inextricably intertwined the global health, environment and sustainable development agendas truly are. Experts may have long predicted the emergence and spread of a pandemic like that which we are currently experiencing, but it is the devastating realities of Coronavirus that will drive the action required to prevent such an event from happening again. Whilst moves to ban the trade and consumption of wildlife and wildlife products in Asia are an encouraging start, we must not rest until the present loopholes are eradicated, and such bans are enshrined into comprehensive laws that extend across the globe.
Alongside the introduction of this binding and ambitious policy, we must make a concerted effort to provide alternative livelihoods and rigorous education programmes in the places where wildlife hunting occurs, as well as tackling the multiple factors which are currently fuelling demand on the receiving end of the supply chain. Humans may well be the first species that is intelligent enough to have developed the tools with which we can monitor, analyse and observe the impact that we are having on our natural environment. It remains to be seen whether we’re clever enough to take the steps required to end our brutal destruction of nature before it is too late.