23 November 20
To the People Who are Donating Now: Thank You!
Just want to take a moment to give a special shout out to the people who are responding to the donation appeals for this drive.
When it’s tough sledding the people who step up are the backbone of the organization.
This is one tough fundraising drive, make no mistake about it. But 464 people so far have said Reader Supported News is worth my time and my contribution.
That is inspiring.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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CAN SOMEONE, ANYONE DONATE $100? - Right now it’s the worst month of fundraising for he year and one of the worst ever. This is a serious problem that threatens RSN — for real. Who out there can spare a hundred? With urgency and respect. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Bess Levin | Steven Mnuchin Swears He's Not Tanking the Economy Just to F--K Over Joe Biden
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "On Thursday, Steven Mnuchin said that he doesn't plan to extend a number of key emergency lending programs beyond the end of the year, asking the Federal Reserve to return the money supporting them to the Treasury."
With coronavirus cases on the rise, the economy may sour again, making the programs more necessary. As recently as Tuesday, [Fed chair Jerome] Powell warned of the potential for economic scarring and said that the economic recovery had “a long way to go.”
omething you’re probably aware of by now, unless you live in a cave or exclusively get your news from @realDonaldTrump and his big boy sons, is that there’s a very contagious disease ravaging the globe that is not just killing more than a million people but jobs and businesses as well. Jobs, for the lazy rich who are unaware, are how people buy stuff like food and pay for things like shelter. So losing them is bad; less bad if you live in a society where the government actually cares about people and doesn’t just say, “tough shit, them’s the breaks,” when you lose one, and more bad if you live in, for example, the United States of America. The current Treasury secretary presumably knows this and, yet, he’s apparently hoping to make a bad situation even worse!
On Thursday, Steven Mnuchin said that he doesn’t plan to extend a number of key emergency lending programs beyond the end of the year, asking the Federal Reserve to return the money supporting them to the Treasury. While the programs expire at the end of 2020, investors had expected them to continue without interruption, given that COVID-19 is spiraling out of control and continues to pose major economic risks. As The New York Times reports, “the pandemic-era programs...have provided an important backstop that has calmed critical markets since the coronavirus took hold in March,” and “removing them could leave significant corners of the financial world vulnerable to the type of volatility that cascaded through the system as virus fears mounted in the spring.” And while any Joe Biden–appointed Treasury secretary would likely restart them immediately, Mnuchin’s move would significantly delay doing so. In a rare critical statement, the Federal Reserve said it “would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy,” which is Fed-speak for “Bitch, the fuck is wrong with you? The economy is hanging on by a thread here!”
Mnuchin, of course, is one of Donald Trump’s most devoted lackeys and Trump would obviously love nothing more than to choke the economy to death right before his successor takes over. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce denounced the move, with Neil Bradley, the group’s executive vice president, saying, “a surprise termination of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity program, including the Main Street Lending Program, prematurely and unnecessarily ties the hands of the incoming administration and closes the door on important liquidity options for businesses at a time when they need them most.” As the Associated Press notes, “many progressive economists have argued that,” with the election of Biden, “a Democratic-led Treasury could support the Fed taking on more risk and making more loans to small and mid-sized businesses and cash-strapped cities under these programs. That would provide at least one avenue for the Biden administration to provide stimulus without going through Congress.” Stimulus that, for some reason, Mitch McConnell is in no hurry to get out to struggling Americans.
Ask Mnuchin about the whole thing, though, and he swears nothing nefarious is going on. “We’re not trying to hinder anything,” he said on CNBC Friday, a claim that somehow not everyone is buying. “There can be no doubt, the Trump administration and their congressional toadies are actively trying to tank the U.S economy,” Senator Sherrod Brown said in a statement. “For months, they have refused to take the steps necessary to support workers, small businesses, and restaurants. As the result, the only tool at our disposal has been these facilities.”
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Voting. (photo: Gabriela Bhaskar / Reuters)
Voter Fraud
David Remnick, The New Yorker
Remnick writes: "Voter fraud is exceedingly rare - but not in the headlines or in the mind of Donald Trump."
oter fraud is exceedingly rare—but not in the headlines or in the mind of Donald Trump. In 2012, Jane Mayer published a profile in The New Yorker of Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who would go on to serve as a member of the Trump Administration’s voter-fraud commission. Spakovsky has created a cottage industry out of stoking fears about illegitimate voting. He has also been instrumental, Mayer observes, in insuring that narratives about widespread voter fraud have become part of Republican orthodoxy, despite the scarcity of documented cases. (One scholar notes that, in 2005, the government charged more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with committing election fraud.) As the late congressman John Lewis put it, Spakovsky and other voter-fraud activists are “trying to create a cure where there is no sickness.” The supposed cure also often amounts to efforts at disenfranchising minorities.
This week, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces about voter fraud and the many myths surrounding it. In “Stacey Abrams’s Fight for a Fair Vote,” Jelani Cobb profiles the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and chronicles her efforts to combat voter suppression. In “Trump and the Truth: The ‘Rigged’ Election,” Jonathan Blitzer discusses Trump’s heated campaign rhetoric in 2016 about the electoral process. (“The election is going to be rigged—I’m going to be honest,” he said. “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe.”) In “Reënacting the Trial of a Black Woman Convicted of Voter Fraud,” Vinson Cunningham explores how a new dramatic reading, “Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason,” echoes Langston Hughes’s “The Ballot and Me.” Finally, in “How Far Could Republicans Take Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud?,” Jeannie Suk Gersen writes about how Trump’s allegations have eroded faith in the democratic process. As we continue to watch events unfold in Washington, we hope you’ll take some time this weekend to delve into these eye-opening pieces.
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Vice President Joe Biden with Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Secretary of State John F. Kerry listen as President Barack Obama and Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki address reporters, November 2013. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Biden Chooses Antony Blinken as Secretary of State
Annie Linskey and John Hudson, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President-elect Joe Biden has selected Antony Blinken, one of his closest and longest-serving foreign policy advisers, as secretary of state as he prepares to unveil a slate of new nominees this week that will emphasize a deep well of experience in the foreign policy and national security establishment."
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People protest in Omaha, Neb., following the police shooting of Kenneth Jones on Thursday. (photo: WOWT)
Protests Erupt in Omaha After Police Fatally Shoot Black Man During Traffic Stop
Ben Kesslen, NBC News
Kesslen writes: "Protests erupted in Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday and Saturday after city police fatally shot a Black man."
ALSO SEE: Cops Deploy Tear Gas During
Protest Over Omaha Police Shooting
Omaha police shot and killed Kenneth Jones, 35, during a traffic stop Thursday night.
rotests erupted in Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday and Saturday after city police fatally shot a Black man.
Omaha police killed Kenneth Jones, 35, on Thursday night while responding to a traffic stop.
Police spotted a car with four people inside stopped in the middle of the road without its hazard lights on, they said in statements Friday and Saturday. The two officers involved in the stop, Dan Faulkner and Richard Martier, instructed all the people in the vehicle to put their hands up, police said, citing interviews with the officers and body camera video not reviewed by NBC News. The officers made the command as they walked to the vehicle.
Faulkner and Martier could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.
Police said in a statement Friday that the three other passengers complied with the order but that Jones did not and that the officers then used a flashlight to break the car window and open the door closest to Jones, who was not driving.
Police said video shows the two officers "struggling" to get Jones out of the car. Police claimed to have seen a gun on Jones during the struggle and fired four shots at him.
Police did not specify which officer fired the fatal shots and said they would provide more details at a news conference Monday. Police said the officers found a gun "directly underneath" Jones after they shot him.
Police said that after they shot Jones, the officers "yelled for him to show his hands," even though he had fallen to the ground from the shots. Jones was taken to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he died.
ProBLAC, a progressive Omaha-based group that advocates for racial justice, condemned the killing in a statement posted to Twitter on Friday, saying "there is no probable cause for him to have been asked to exit the vehicle."
People gathered outside police headquarters Friday and Saturday night to protest the killing.
Peyton Zyla, an organizer with ProBLAC, told the Obama World-Herald that "until [police] prove that they didn't murder a Black man, we're not shutting up — not one bit."
Police declared both protests "unlawful assemblies." On Friday, they arrested a protester for "assault of an officer" after he was alleged to have shined a "laser light" on an officer's face, and they said they made similar arrests for "assault" Saturday.
Protesters told the World-Herald that they had to go to the hospital after having been "maced" and struck by police.
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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detain a man during an operation in Escondido, California on July 8, 2019. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
The Time Has Come for a Reckoning on US Immigrant Abuse
Azadeh Shahshahani and Sarah Paoletti, Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The time has come for DHS and ICE to have their reckoning."
A letter to the UN by four congresswomen renews hope that abuse of detained immigrants in the US will finally be addressed.
n mid-September, several organisations including Project South filed a complaint with the inspector-general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS OIG) about medical abuse immigrants were facing at the Irwin County Detention Center in the US state of Georgia. It provided shocking details of medical malpractice including a high number of invasive gynaecological procedures with dubious consent procedures, in some cases leading to sterilisation. The complaint was based in part on revelations by Dawn Wooten, a whistleblower nurse employed at the centre.
According to media reports, at least 57 women have come forward with complaints of forced and harmful gynaecological procedures endured at the hands of the doctor contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide medical care and some have faced retaliation by the authorities for speaking up. The medical abuse at the detention centre has once again brought to light the need for the international community to investigate the practices of the DHS and its agency, ICE.
Several weeks after the complaint was filed, on October 23, House Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley sent a letter to the United Nations, calling for a thorough, impartial and transparent investigation by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) into the numerous, persistent and grave violations committed with impunity by DHS against immigrants detained in its custody.
Shortly after, several civil society organisations, including Project South, submitted a communication to the OHCHR Special Procedures Office with the relevant mandates, also requesting an investigation. The document also calls on the UN to urge the US government to take all necessary measures to end the abuse, and to provide full redress and reparations to those who have suffered in ICE custody at the Irwin County Detention Center, and immigrant detention centres across the country.
The different mandate holders will make decisions about what follow-up is necessary. They may issue a statement of concern urging an end to abusive practices within immigrant detention, protection and redress for those women who have come forward; request an invitation from the US to conduct a site visit to allow for an independent investigation and consultations with affected parties, other stakeholders, and US government representatives; and can ultimately issue a formal communication of their findings and recommendations, including urging an end to immigrant detention except in extremely limited circumstances and only as a matter of last resort, consistent with international law.
A statement or communication from the UN Human Rights mechanisms can then form the basis of advocacy within the US, especially with the incoming Biden administration and within the international community, including countries whose nationals have been directly harmed.
These formal requests submitted to the UN are a recognition of the failure of all three branches of the US government to bring an end to a history of abuse within immigrant detention. This is not just a failure of the Trump administration, but of successive administrations which have continued to pursue immigration policies that violate basic human rights and dignity and enrich private prison corporations.
Violations carried out by ICE officials have persisted and so has abuse in private detention centres. ICE has continued and expanded contracts with such institutions. including LaSalle Corrections, which operates the Irwin County Detention Center. Last year, ICE’s own inspector general issued a report detailing various violations by detention centres, including the inadequate provision of food and medical services.
Human rights organisations have also found evidence of various forms of abuse, including deprivations of the right to freedom of religion; medical neglect with fatal consequences; unsanitary and inhumane conditions of detention; forcible separation of children from their parents; deaths of immigrants at the hands of US Customs and Border Patrol; and retaliation against whistleblowers and others seeking redress for abuses in detention.
For years, immigrants at the centre and human rights advocates have been calling for recognition of their right to dignity and to be treated humanely, but with little success.
Having witnessed for a long time the refusal of the US authorities to hold themselves accountable for these grave abuses, we, as legal experts, have worked together in pursuit of accountability through international institutions.
In May 2018, Project South and the Penn Law Transnational Legal Clinic sent a letter to the OHCHR, which detailed numerous violations suffered by immigrants detained at both Irwin and Stewart, including the rampant use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment and control; forced labour and exploitation of immigrants’ labour; alarmingly inadequate, neglectful and negligent medical care, as well as the provision of unsanitary food and water; a disregard for immigrants’ cultural and religious beliefs and race-based discrimination; denial of due process; and interference in the right to family life.
In October 2018, 11 separate independent human rights monitoring bodies operating under the auspices of the OHCHR sent a formal communication to the US government expressing grave concern over reported rights abuses committed against individuals held in immigration detention at the Irwin County Detention Center and the Stewart Detention Center, also in Georgia and run by the for-profit corporation, CoreCivic.
In the two years since we sent this letter, we have repeatedly called upon the US government to end these abuses, yet instead, they have persisted. Between October 2018 and now, 30 immigrants are reported to have died in immigrant custody, four of whom were detained at Stewart.
The time has come for DHS and ICE to have their reckoning. The international community must respond by leading an independent, thorough and transparent investigation that ultimately results in accountability and redress for the untold number of immigrants and their family members who have suffered at the hands of ICE and the contractors profiting from their detention and abuse.
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Anti-government protests in Guatemala City. (photo: Reuters)
Guatemala's Congress to Revoke Budget That Sparked Protests
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Guatemala's Congress President Allan Rodriguez Monday announced the reversal of the 2021 state budget, which approval last week gave rise to a massive demonstration and the burning of part of Parliament on Saturday."
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Pangolins. (photo: Jimin Lai/AFP/Getty Images)
A Plan to Save Wildlife May Have Done More Harm Than Good
Natasha Gilbert and Knowable, The Atlantic
Excerpt: "Banning the trade of vulnerable species sometimes makes them more vulnerable."
ustoms officials in Singapore made a grisly discovery in April 2019 at a port on the island’s southern coast. Inside shipping containers supposedly transporting frozen beef from Nigeria to Vietnam, they found bloodstained sacks stuffed with 13 tons of scales stripped illegally from pangolins—scaly, anteater-like mammals endemic to Africa and Asia. The seizure, worth about $38.7 million, is thought to be the largest bust of pangolin products globally in recent years.
People hunt pangolins for their meat, considered a delicacy in Asia, and for their scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat ills such as arthritis. All eight pangolin species are now vulnerable or endangered, and in 2016 more than 180 nations banned most cross-border commercial trade in them. They did so under a major international agreement called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, commonly referred to as CITES. Trade bans on endangered species are the most severe restriction under CITES, which also limits trade in species that are at risk of overexploitation but not yet endangered, requiring permits for their export.
Conservation organizations hailed the pangolin ban as a big win in the war against the multibillion-dollar wildlife trade. But some scientists and wildlife trade experts worry that CITES bans—in this case and others—may be backfiring, by encouraging rather than suppressing trade in a species. “As products become rarer, prices and demand increase. You just hit species all the way into extinction,” says Brett Scheffers, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida. Poorly policed trade controls can allow illegal trade to flourish, adds Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, a sustainability economist specializing in the wildlife trade at the University of Oxford.
In 1977, for example, an international trade ban on the black rhino led to a tenfold increase in the price of rhino horn over a two-year period, spurring poaching and driving populations to extinction in some areas. And trade restrictions that began in 2013 on species of rosewood trees helped make the precious timber the most trafficked group of endangered species in the world.
It’s too soon to know if the same kind of thing is happening with pangolins, but there are troubling signs, says Dan Challender, a conservation scientist who works with ‘t Sas-Rolfes at Oxford and specializes in pangolins and wildlife trade policy: Seizures of pangolin parts in high volumes appear to be on the uptick.
There’s no disagreement among researchers that the wildlife trade is a major contributor to the loss of biodiversity worldwide. Where they disagree is over what the countries that are signed up to CITES should do about it.
Many conservation groups say that CITES is one of the best tools they have—letting signatory nations ban international trade for species that are already endangered and set trade limits for species that are at risk due to commercial activities. But trade experts like Sabri Zain, director of policy for TRAFFIC, a nonprofit group working to make the wildlife trade more sustainable, say that CITES rests too heavily on bans when it’s meant to help ensure that the wildlife trade meets people’s needs while also safeguarding nature.
“When you talk to people about CITES, the first thing that comes to their mind is trade bans,” Zain says. “But the real heart of CITES is sustainability.” Critics also argue that countries don’t adequately apply science to assess whether CITES bans and quotas will work the way they’re intended—or will make matters worse by sparking illegal trade. All these difficulties have left CITES gasping for breath, says ‘t Sas-Rolfes. “CITES,” he says, “is a terminally ill patient that is in need of serious attention.”
CITES was born in the mid-1970s out of public concern that countries weren’t adequately protecting rare and threatened species. The aim was to encourage governments to restrict imports from nations that lacked protections for plants and animals that are on the “red list” of threatened species as identified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the globe’s leading authority on the state of the natural world. Today, CITES is a voluntary agreement among 182 nations, as well as the European Union; it protects more than 38,000 species of plants and animals to varying degrees.
To safeguard a species under CITES, a country makes its case for protection—to either ban or limit trade—at the CITES meeting held every two to three years. If two-thirds of member nations vote to approve the proposal, each country then creates laws and systems to implement it. If trade is restricted rather than banned, countries will dole out a limited number of trade permits at levels deemed sustainable for safeguarding a species. Typically, trade restrictions are applied first—but if they fail to help populations recover, countries can propose bans.
Clearly, action is needed. Roughly a million species are threatened with extinction, according to a major international study published last year. Researchers found that trade and personal use of species by people is the second leading driver of these extinction threats, behind only habitat destruction.
The devastating impact on global diversity from the harvesting of wild animals and plants makes CITES “one of the most important available tools to address the extinction crisis,” said Mark Jones, head of policy at the conservation group Born Free, and Alice Stroud, director of Africa policy at Born Free USA, in a statement to Knowable Magazine. Once countries restrict or ban trade in a species, that species becomes a high priority for conservation in its native country, they wrote.
In a briefing note, the CITES Secretariat pointed to successes such as the recovery of the pirarucu: the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish, which can stretch more than three meters and weigh 220 kilograms. Pirarucu populations plummeted in the Amazon basin in the late 1960s due to overfishing. Following CITES trade restrictions in 1975, community-led conservation and monitoring programs helped the giant fish bounce back in some areas.
And at a meeting last year, CITES members agreed to relax a 50-year-old trade ban on an Argentine population of the delicately featured vicuña (Vicugna vicugna)—a cousin of the camel that is prized for its wool—after community-led conservation efforts had helped the species back on its feet. CITES members also agreed that—as a result of conservation and captive breeding programs—American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) populations in Mexico had recovered sufficiently to allow some trade, which had been banned since 1975.
But bans and trade restrictions don’t always work as intended. For example, a 2010 trade ban on critically endangered European eels (Anguilla anguilla)—driven by culinary demand from China and Japan—hasn’t helped their chances of survival, recent findings show. In 2019, an international anti-trafficking operation announced that illegal fishing is now a major factor in European eel declines, with up to 350 million eels smuggled from Europe to Asia each year.
And legal trade in the tiny Kleinmann’s tortoise (Testudo kleinmanni) skyrocketed in 1994, the year before a ban took effect: Some 2,800 individuals were sold, representing half of the species’ total estimated adult population.
Critics say that part of the problem is that for many species, long-term data on populations are lacking—so that countries can only take a best guess at whether a species is in trouble and, if so, whether that’s due to trade. What’s more, the critics add, countries and CITES administrators fail to thoroughly analyze how bans or restrictions might affect trade in the species. An analysis by Challender published in April 2019 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment found that proposals to ban trade under CITES commonly fail to examine markets for wildlife in detail. Of the 17 proposals that were scheduled for a vote at last August’s meeting, including ones for Brazil’s riverside swallowtail butterfly (Parides burchellanus) and the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), Challender found that all but one lacked detailed trade analyses.
The CITES Secretariat said in a statement that the treaty’s administrators do collect data from countries on legal imports and exports, and for some iconic animals they have established more elaborate monitoring systems. The most sophisticated of these tracks the illegal killing of elephants and analyzes illegal trade. When wildlife rangers around the world find elephant carcasses, for example, they establish the cause of death and report the information to the CITES program that monitors the illegal killing of elephants. The information is included in a database and analyzed to help keep an eye on poaching and trends in illegal trade.
But Challender argues that this isn’t enough. Decisions to tighten trade, he says, need a comprehensive assessment of the likely consequences of doing so—including information on market factors such as retail prices, sales volumes, consumer preferences, and social and cultural attitudes to the consumption of wildlife. And when the data suggest that outright bans or severe trade restrictions won’t work, those who would safeguard wildlife should look to other creative solutions. “A trade ban may feel intuitively positive, but it’s difficult to predict the outcome for species,” he says.
Complicating matters are disagreements over how to best safeguard a species from extinction while balancing its importance to some people’s livelihoods.
Groups such as Born Free, which prioritizes animal welfare, doubt that wildlife trade could ever be sustainable or thus helpful to conservation. Legal trade creates opportunities to launder specimens obtained illegally, say Jones and Stroud. For example, ivory products from legal and illegal sources were sold side by side in China prior to the country’s domestic ban on ivory trade in 2017.
But some wildlife-trade analysts note that sustainable trade provides a livelihood for people in many communities, and constitutes big business in countries like China. Banning or restricting trade when there’s little evidence to suggest that tighter controls may help a species, they say, can harm local communities and shift countries’ limited conservation funds away from neglected species.
“From our perspective, a [trade ban] is more a sign of conservation failure rather than a goal to strive for,” Zain says. A ban, he adds, shows that previous efforts to restrict trade through limited export permits failed to help a species’ population recover.
Zain wants to see more effort put into making trade restrictions work for species by better assessing their populations and how much trade a given population can handle. If those additional efforts fail, countries could then consider a ban.
Representatives from CITES acknowledged that legal wildlife trade is essential for the livelihoods of many local people, but said that the type of extensive data collection advocated by Challender would be too time-consuming and expensive if done for every species under threat. Still, they added, the convention has made improvements. Since 2017, it has required countries to report data on illegal trade garnered from seizures and other violations. Member countries have contracted the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to develop a database of countries’ illegal trade to make data analysis easier; the office has produced two detailed global reports, the most recent in July of this year.
Many experts believe that CITES has a key role to play, but they fear that the wildlife trade is too big and complex for CITES to manage alone. And the international marketplace in wildlife—legal and illicit—stands to grow in the future, Scheffers says. Currently, more than 7,600 species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles are traded globally, and Scheffers predicts that another 4,000 or more could be traded in the future. It’s not clear that CITES alone can cope with the scale of the problem.
So what is the answer? In a paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, ‘t Sas-Rolfes discusses a range of measures beyond CITES that he thinks could make the treaty more effective.
One key tool is local detection of illegal activity, courtesy of new geospatial technologies, in order to catch more poachers. An example is the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool, developed in 2011 and now in use in more than 60 countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. Rangers can input data onto handheld devices as they patrol. The software takes data on areas surveyed, snares removed, and arrests made, and converts that information into maps. It also lets rangers take photos for evidence and identification; the software tags them with time and place stamps.
The data are updated in real time, helping connect rangers in the field to command centers elsewhere, aiding operations as they happen. And knowing where poaching and smuggling has previously occurred can help rangers better plan patrols and improve enforcement, the technology’s creators say. They report that the software has saved rangers time and helped operations run more smoothly. That has reportedly contributed to a 67 percent increase in patrols at protected areas in Nigeria managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society—and a 71 percent reduction in gorilla hunting there.
A more novel strategy is the development of “synthetic” alternatives to illicitly traded animal products, such as rhino horn and pangolin scales. Introducing cheaper substitutes for wildlife products can drive down prices and reduce illegal harvesting, studies suggest. Researchers have had some success making biofabricated horn from horsehair; it’s reportedly identical to wild rhino horn. But that product isn’t yet on the market, so its acceptance—and thus, any conservation benefits—remains to be seen.
In a similar vein, Conservation X Labs, a technology company in Washington, D.C., that works on solutions to conservation challenges, hopes to develop synthetic pangolin scales as a substitute for the wild-caught product. Alex Dehgan, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, says the project is still in very early stages.
Another approach—and one that’s controversial—is to raise animals such as lions and bears in captivity to help satisfy consumer demand for wildlife products while protecting wild populations. Such wildlife-farming initiatives have had mixed results. Researchers report that South Africa, for example, has legally exported farmed lion parts to Southeast Asia and China to replace the use of wild large cats for tiger wines and health tonics. But that program has also been widely criticized for poor animal-welfare standards, and wildlife-conservation organizations argue that the practice provides cover for illegal trade. “A legal trade removes the stigma attached to wildlife-product consumption and increases demand,” Jones and Stroud say.
CITES would also have more teeth if its efforts were linked with other international conservation agreements, Scheffers says. He suggests a partnership with the United Nations Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. This would help foster initiatives that support the forest-dwelling people who depend on the wildlife trade for their livelihoods. Local people who are directly affected by CITES rules struggle to get their views and experiences heard in CITES decision-making, Scheffers says; for him and some other experts, this is among the convention’s biggest flaws.
Indeed, ‘t Sas-Rolfes says, for conservation efforts to be effective, they need to involve “the people who have skin in the game on the ground.” Early findings from one of his research projects suggest that governments that encourage participation from local communities are more successful in conserving wildlife and biodiversity. More governments should encourage participation from local communities at CITES meetings, he says—and the meetings should give local people more time and space to express their views. CITES will also struggle to achieve its goals unless it gets better data, Scheffers says.
Still, although CITES has its problems, even its critics aren’t ready to abandon the program just yet.
“With all its flaws and faults,” Zain says, “it’s really the only tool out there.”
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ane Goodall is an expert on alpha males — for decades, she’s been studying them in chimpanzee communities. She’s also inspired leaders in business, politics and culture to change their approach to animals and the environment.
