General Studies (Paper - 1) : Model Question & Answers

Question: Critically analyze the expanding wildlife crimes. What boosts the illegal trade and suggest ways to check the online wildlife crimes?

Answer: Illegal wildlife crimes have increased to meet the increasing Asian (mainly Chinese) demand for elephant ivory, rhino horns, and tiger products. Controlled by dangerous crime syndicates, wildlife criminals often operate with impunity making the trade a low-risk/high profit business estimated at up to $10 billion annually. Illegal wildlife trade is one of the reasons (the major reason being habitat destruction) behind the 52% decline in wildlife populations of vertebrate species – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish – over the last 40 years.

The current scenario should be tackled by making concrete efforts to reduce the demand of wildlife products through promoting species conservation, empowering people to protect wildlife and promoting and scaling community-based conservation. Some other activities which can be undertaken are pushing governments to protect threatened animal populations by increasing law enforcement, imposing strict deterrents, reducing demand for endangered species products and honouring international commitments made under CITES. Most importantly, a reduction in demand for illegal wildlife parts and products can only happen if the buyers start asking questions and get the facts before buying any wildlife or plant product.

Due to its anonymity, wildlife trade (dependent on wildlife crimes) gets carried out in the cyberspace which can be dealt through a well coordinated global effort to track such trading entities. Strong International Convention with UN backing; Strengthening existing framework (CITES, TRAFFIC, CAWT) and enhancing their jurisdiction; Better cyber architecture to track the criminals online and promotion of ethical hacking to bug and hack the online trading platforms, are some of the other activities which can be performed to ensure a reduction in the illegal wildlife trade and crimes.