If the improved level of law enforcement demonstrated this month can be maintained, ivory smugglers, wildlife traffickers and pangolin poachers could be in for a tougher time than usual. That would be a welcome development given the increasing threat these criminal networks pose to endangered animal, aquatic and plant species. Their activities constitute a multi-billion-baht industry that police have described as the second most lucrative illegal business after drug trafficking. Unfortunately, Thailand has become a major transit hub for smugglers of exotic wildlife because of laws that are weak, penalties that lack any clout and enforcement that is sporadic.
The scope of their operations was demonstrated last week when customs officers seized contraband ivory consisting of 158 tusks from Kenya which had been declared as handicrafts. They weighed 456kg, possessed a street value of 23 million baht and were retrieved from a warehouse at Suvarnabhumi airport. That was no surprise as the illegal ivory trade is transnational in nature, with the elephants usually killed in Africa, their tusks sent to craftsmen here for carving and the finished products then exported to international customers.
But the trade goes beyond raw ivory. Earlier this year a raid in Saraburi's Kaeng Khoi district rescued 51 species of animal including five tigers, 13 white lions, three pumas and two red pandas. Thousands of pangolins are known to have been smuggled to Vietnam and China where the meat from the supposedly protected animals is considered a delicacy, but Nong Khai police have just foiled the latest shipment and rescued 12 of them.
Successive Thai governments have held out promises of tougher laws to protect the country's disappearing wildlife, something the well-intentioned but ineffectual 1992 Preservation and Protection Act and earlier 1961 Parks Act have clearly failed to do. Evidence of this can be seen any weekend at Chatuchak Market. Not far from the rows of often sick, caged creatures for sale can be found clusters of wildlife traders who operate openly with no apparent fear of the law. Arrests for trafficking usually result in fines or light prison sentences, often suspended. Stricter punishments are needed to discourage these criminals from continuing to profit from the harm of both individual animals and also entire populations, such as tigers, elephants and pangolins. But the drafting of a tougher law, which has been the subject of years of discussion, seems as distant a prospect as ever.
We can have nothing but shame at the events of the past decade and the international criticism they have brought as one scandal has followed another. There was the disastrous attempt to import 135 wild animals including zebras and giraffes from Kenya for the Night Safari Zoo in Chiang Mai, the clandestine export of up to 100 tigers to a Chinese zoo, the smuggling of orangutans from Indonesia to a private Thai zoo and the protracted delay in returning them, and the mishandling of an elephant-koala swap with Australia. Fortunately, reason prevailed and the plan to import polar bears to Chiang Mai Zoo was quietly shelved last year.
It is ironic that a country that devotes an entire television channel to watch over Lhinping, the adorable three-year-old panda, should allow this cruel trade in rare and endangered species to thrive and permit itself to occupy the position of third worst offender, after Congo and Nigeria, on the illegal ivory trade watchlist of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, better known as Cites. This is a disgrace and the government should consider initiatives to tackle such black market commerce and get off these watchlists. We are on too many.