'When I say I work on wildlife trafficking people think I'm a hippy'

Wild Crime speaks to Sarah Baker Ferguson of TRAFFIC

In today’s newsletter Wild Crime spoke to Sarah Baker Ferguson. She’s policy director at TRAFFIC, one of the largest NGOs in the world working on wildlife crime and trafficking. Its goal is to ensure that any trade in wild animals is legal and sustainable. Sarah’s role is to help guide its policy in meeting those aims.

We spoke earlier this month about her work, why understanding the impact of wildlife trafficking is so important, and why people think she’s a hippy when she walks into a room.

Can you describe your work?

Traffic is nearly 50 years old. We were founded to do trade data analysis for UN processes like CITES and then we’ve grown to cover a lot more. Basically we work to shine a spotlight [on this issue] through science and research. We take an evidential approach to find what the issues are.

We don't do advocacy, per se, where we say ‘look at the sad elephants’. We’ll say, okay, this is the number of animals or plants out there, can nature accept the amount of trade that is happening? We develop a picture around the poaching situation and then we say: ‘now we know what’s happening we can develop initiatives around that?’

Why is the demand happening? What are the socio-economic issues driving it? So it’s about trying to bring science, policy and research to these issues. It can be dry, but I think it’s very necessary to say these are the facts around what’s happening.

What threat does wildlife trafficking pose?

It's important, intrinsically, for us to have nature and to have these animals and plants around us. But you know, even taking the intrinsic value of wildlife out of the mix, we need to have clean air to breathe, and we need to have ecosystems for the people that live among nature.

But there's no single threat that it poses. It’s part of a complex picture.

I think people are used to looking at things as a separate issue. Climate change. Human trafficking. I think people are finally starting to look at all of these things happening together, because all these threats are interlinked. Wildlife trafficking is animals, but it’s also plants. If you look at deforestation, a lot of deforestation happens because of illegal logging and removing forests exacerbates climate change. If you have good, big, healthy forests they are climate sinks.

With fisheries, there's a lot of slave labour on fishing boats. That’s something that we're finding, and so we're starting to tackle those issues together. And there's a lot of drug crime and things like that that are converging with wildlife crime.

So, you know, to talk about wildlife crime, and to remove it from any other environmental system or even criminal system, is almost impossible to do.

What are the biggest issues facing those combating wildlife trafficking?

I think some of the biggest ones are [a lack of] political will and corruption.

Even if it's recognised as a threat, it's getting governments to really act on it. Governments recognise drug crime as a threat and weapon smuggling. Wildlife crime is a threat, and it's one of the biggest crimes out there. But it's not something that governments particularly care about.

It's also what we call low risk and high reward. This can lead to financial crimes. Sometimes it allows frontline enforcement and governments to be able to profit off looking the other way. Although, that’s not the case everywhere and I don't want to undermine or devalue the hard work that goes into making a seizure.

Are there particular regions that are problematic?

There are some countries that are bigger problems than others.