Inside the Global Underground Wildlife Trafficking Market

I'll be watching, left and right. I pray God will provide for us tonight. My friends call me Agu, and I've been hunting for over 20 years in Africa. I hunt many animals, but pangolin is different. It's very expensive and scarce. The jungle is dangerous. When you are going in search of pangolins, by hearing its noise, you know. Let's go. I've got one pangolin. I used to go to the jungle in a week, two weeks, and you'd discover four or five pangolins. But now, it's not common. It's not common. Pangolins are being wiped out. All of them are threatened with extinction, driven by the demand for their scales. These are pangolin scales, some people consider more valuable than ivory. The pangolin is now the most illegally trafficked mammal, even before the rhino horn. The global illegal wildlife industry has been estimated upwards of $23 billion a year. It is not child's play. People are really making a lot of money from illegal trafficking of wildlife. We are not serious about wildlife laws, but wildlife actually matters. If we think we are superior, kill everything, in the end, we're going to kill ourselves. Did it have enough to eat? Okay, that's cool. It was so active yesterday. Before 2015, Nigeria was not really known as a country of importance when it comes to pangolin trafficking. But by 2016, to present day, we have become the hotspot of exporting pangolin scales. Hello, docs. Good afternoon. Wow, lovely. We need to do morphometrics, you know, taking samples, just to check that it is healthy. What's the name of it? Rocky. Okay, Rocky. I have to check the sex. Let's see if it's male or female. It's still struggling. Okay, good. Okay, Rocky is 1,076 grams. 1,076 grams? Yes. Sometimes we get pangolins that are injured, you know, from the field or from the wildlife trade. What we do is we treat them to make sure they are healthy before we release them. That's another tick. Okay. They are very shy, you know. They are very sensitive. One of them in a year can eat millions of ants and termites. So we call them natural pest controllers. So we cannot overemphasize the importance of the pangolin in the ecosystem. Oh, God. Okay, so this particular pangolin we have here is very active, but we need to take some measurements. So what we have done is to calm it down. Very little is known about the pangolins. Everything we do is just to know more so that we can help them more. There's quite a lot to learn from the pangolins, quite a lot. At the international level, any international trade in pangolins or their derivatives is illegal. Hundreds of countries across the world committed to this wildlife protection law and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora, or CITES, meaning that these signatories, countries such as China and Nigeria, have signed up and made commitments to make sure that trade in protected species is illegal. Business as usual is no longer an option. Everybody has agreed to this. There have been some notable investigations and enforcement effort, but on the whole, trafficking groups are operating with almost complete impunity. In Nigeria, the law states that if you are caught with a pangolin, you will pay five million naira or go to one year in prison. But what do we see? A lot of black markets are thriving. It's not that the laws are not there. The laws are there, but nobody is enforcing those laws. ... People search for pangolins for two things. for the meat, for the scales. In Asia, in China especially, they use the pangolin scales in traditional Chinese medicine. They tell you that the scales can be used to cure arthritis, to let you lactate, you know, for everything. In fact, they are even claiming that it can cure cancer. So China is the driving force to pangolin trafficking because the pangolins are only found in two continents, Asia and Africa. Now, they have totally and unsustainably exploited their own pangolin species in China. So the focus is now on Africa to get the pangolins they need. So how can I buy it? Do you know what will happen? You can see the size now. You know, it's very big. OK. There's a network. You have the hunters. You have the bushmeat sellers. Then you have middlemen that will come to bushmeat sellers or bushmeat markets and then link up with the Chinese. The price that a pangolin would be bought in a village would probably be less than US$10. An end buyer in China is going to pay upwards of US$1,000 to US$2,000 per kilogram. My family is from Bukhara. I was born and raised in Bukhara. China is focusing here to get the pangolins they need because our borders are porous and the corruption level in the country, they can bribe their way through and get the pangolins exported out of Africa. The pangolin scales are typically consolidated in Nigeria and then the shipments will travel over the sea past South Africa and head to places like Singapore and Malaysia. From there, they might go directly to China or into Vietnam. And when they hit Vietnam in a port like Haiphong, the pangolin scales will be broken down into the smaller shipments to conceal these products and sent into China where the pangolin scales will enter the traditional Chinese medicine supply chain. It's a multinational crime in all respects. INVE is one of the first organizations that are working on wildlife protection in Vietnam. We try to improve law and policy in relation to wildlife protection in Vietnam. Vietnam plays such an important part because Vietnam has the border with China and traditionally the border with China is easy to cross by Vietnamese. People have been using Vietnam as a layover country. However, we see that some pangolin scales will stay here to meet the demand here in Vietnam. We still see that pangolin scale in TCM shops. So our wildlife crime unit maps out what are the networks behind trading, selling pangolin scales or live pangolin. We try to target those major traders. We provide that information to law enforcement agencies. Whenever we do any operations, we have to do it undercover to hide our identity in order to find the truth. We go into different business establishments in a specific district and to see whether they are selling a pangolin scale or not. If we can get one shop arrested for selling pangolin scales, then it will be a very good example to deter other shop owners from selling pangolin scales. Where are you going? I'm going to the first shop. It's a 2.5-storey building. They sell pangolin scales. They have been selling pangolin scales for 5-7 years. I'm going to the second shop. It's not open yet. I'm going to ask for the price of milk. I have to ask for the price of milk. This is a pangolin scale. It's 2 million VND. This is the owner. Her name is ***. She knows that she is not allowed to sell this. She always says that the shops that sell pangolin scales are all children. So they don't dare to continue. This is a good example. It shows that it's better to follow the law. Sometimes you can only get the small fish. It's not always easy to get the leaders of the network. You don't know who is behind that shipment. But we know that the majority of them go into China. Pangolin will be smuggled using a hidden trail or go with other legal products through the official route. Sometimes they will disguise the pangolin scale together with legal stuff like vegetables, nuts, even medical commodities. You name it. A pangolin trafficker may also traffic ivory. It may also traffic rhino horn or marine products. And actually it's the same routes that are being used. These criminal networks are very clever and very sophisticated in the techniques that they're using. At the international level, trafficking pangolins is illegal. But then you can go to national levels, such as China, where there continues to be these exemptions at the national level in the laws. Exemptions that mean that even protected species can be used commercially. However, in 2020, China announced that it was removing pangolin from the traditional Chinese medicine, Pharmacopoeia, which is a book containing different formulas of traditional medicine. The National People's Congress of China has made a decision to ban illegal trade and use of wild animals. On June 5, Chuan Shanjia was promoted to National Level 1 to protect wild animals. Therefore, the decision to remove pangolins is a great joy for everyone. China has told us that they have removed or banned the use of pangolin scales in traditional medicine. But I'm not comfortable with this declaration. How can I blackmail you? Because this is a sensitive topic. I don't want to get into trouble because of this. It is very convenient to buy medicine in China. Look at the ingredients of this medicine. There is also Chuan Shanjia in it. This is Chuan Shanjia. How long does it take? About 20 minutes. My family has banned the use of Chuan Shanjia. But now you can still buy this. What is the purpose? What is the effect of this medicine? Chuan Shanjia is used to treat colds and flu. Chuan Shanjia is also used for mouth and eyes. Chuan Shanjia is also used for hands and feet. Chuan Shanjia and Chuan Shanjia are the same medicine. Chuan Shanjia is the oldest Chinese medicine. China came out and announced that they have banned the use of pangolin scales in traditional Chinese medicine. But what do we see? It's just on paper. It is still being used. The Chinese government maintains that there is a stockpile of pangolin scales that companies and hospitals can legally use. Pangolin scales sourced from Asian pangolins that had been killed many years ago in China. The problem is this was a finite stockpile. So it's very likely that the original stockpile has been depleted. The demand for pangolin scales is very likely to exceed what is available through the stockpiles. So we think that huge quantities of illicitly sourced pangolin scales in China are being laundered into these stockpiles and then being sold as legal medicines. In traditional Chinese medicine, there are probably about 12,000 to 15,000 ingredients of medicine. As a Chinese medicine doctor, people ask me, do you use pangolin scales? I say I don't. It's completely unnecessary. And this is a very good, in a way, replacement of pangolin scales. Have exact same function, moving the blood, open the blockage, and they're all pure herbs and looks beautiful, smell beautiful, and they work like wonder. I've been practicing Chinese medicine more than 40 years. I never use, I never need to use them. This pangolin scale, I'm very happy. We don't need to use these animal products if we can avoid it. There's no such evidence pangolin scales are particularly good for cancer or for other blockage, arthritis, or for women producing milk. Many other things can be substituted. And some of them have even done proper scientific research to prove those plants have a better result. But then the question will be asked, why pangolin scales is used in Chinese medicine? Some people get this idea, the more expensive, the better. And that's why the pangolin scales become more expensive. People believe, their perception, the more they believe, the rarer they are, they become more expensive. I think in the West, we really do not understand traditional Chinese medicine at all. There's the sort of heritage and its value to Chinese culture, but there's also the industry and business component as well. The traditional Chinese medicine market is worth hundreds of billion U.S. dollars a year. With it being such a large industry, there is a significant profit motive here. Africa is attractive to China because most African countries are poor. They're exploiting them because of their ignorance and because of their poverty level. The carrots they are dangling in front of people, poor people, it's something they cannot resist. I'm looking forward to a time when we want to deal decisively with culprits in wildlife trafficking. The lack of international cooperation targeting pangolin networks is a big issue. If countries were to come together and investigate these groups more closely, we would see more disruption and probably less pangolin trafficking. But ultimately, the key aspect is for the demand to be ended. If we stop using, we stop trading. Stop trading, we stop killing. That's simple logic. This is the best time to talk about pangolin trafficking because if we do not do that right now, when we wake up one day and we will not find the pangolins we want to talk about, they would have gone extinct. These are very sensitive animals. Once you keep them for too long, they just die off. They are meant to stay in their particular habitats. I would like to wish Rocky a great life. We will miss you. Why should we be concerned about pangolins or other animals? Every member of the world's population, including animals, are part of this world. They have a right to share. We live in a whole ecosystem. Wildlife actually matters. We are alive today because these things are still there. If we cut down all the trees, remove all the wildlife, and we are alone on the planet, how do we survive?