Time to Crack Down on Wildlife Trafficking

The United States plays a major role in the illegal wildlife trade. Demand for these animals and products are high here, and countless thousands of them come into our country every year. Thousands more travel through it, on their way to other destinations.

Defenders recently analyzed a decade of data on the illegal trade coming into the U.S. from Latin America. We found trade patterns, identified the top impacted species, looked at the products most often smuggled, and more. But perhaps the most urgent of all our findings was that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is alarmingly under-equipped to combat this illegal trade at and within our own borders. In addition to educating consumers and strengthening wildlife laws, we need to increase our law enforcement capacity to combat wildlife trafficking into and out of the country.

Wanted: More Boots on the Ground

FWS law enforcement officers are our front line of defense against wildlife trafficking. They inspect wildlife imports and exports and intercept illegal shipments at our ports of entry. In fiscal year 2014, the FWS only had the funding to hire 130 wildlife inspectors nationwide. This number begins to look startlingly low when you consider that there are 328 ports of entry throughout the country. Only 38 of those are staffed full time by wildlife inspectors. That means 89% of our ports of entry are in desperate need of staffing. With so many ports unattended, it is clear that the United States needs to increase the ranks of wildlife officers.

Volume Overload

Even at those ports that do have full time staff, the inspectors are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of trade. For example, staff at the Los Angeles port of entry consists of one supervisor, one detector dog, and eight to ten wildlife inspectors. Although Los Angeles is considered one port of entry, it actually includes multiple facilities: Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario International Airport, Palm Springs International Airport, Victorville Logistics Airports, several international courier and mail facilities and three sea ports. That team of inspectors did process an impressive 22,496 shipments in FY 2013. But Los Angeles International Airport alone processed 1.9 million tons of national and international air cargo, and the Port of Los Angeles processed 5.5 million international containers the same year. This means that despite the immense amount of work this team did, they were able to check just a fraction of one percent of all the shipments coming through Los Angeles. Without even accounting for the other facilities included at this port of entry, it becomes very clear that even when their full team is working, there is barely enough capacity to place a single wildlife inspector at each facility, let alone make headway in detecting the illegal and undeclared wildlife shipments concealed in any number of the millions of containers.

Top U.S. Ports of Entry

While illegal wildlife is inevitably smuggled in to the United States through any and all of the 328 ports of entry, our study uncovered the ports of entry most frequently used to import illegal wildlife from Latin America: El Paso, Miami and Houston. Together, these three ports were responsible for seizing 53.3% of all illegal wildlife shipments containing protected species imported from Latin America between 2004 and 2013. Combined, these ports of entry seized a total of at least 18,554 illegal products and 55,533 pounds of illegal wildlife. And these are just the shipments that were caught. At this level of trade, just imagine the volume of wildlife and products that could be coming through other ports across the country, undetected because there simply aren’t enough hands to do the job.

As the effort to combat wildlife trafficking gears up around the world, we cannot forget the role the United States plays as a consumer and transit country. We are in a unique position. We can have a huge impact on the illegal trade in wildlife simply by reducing our own consumer demand and close our ports of entry to illegal imports and exports. But we cannot do this if the agency that we rely on most heavily to enforce these measures is underfunded and understaffed. The U.S. has made incredible strides in terms of policy-level mandates, but now it’s time to support the people who are on the ground carrying out these tasks.