After COVID-19, Southeast Asia strongly favours crackdown on wildlife trade

BANGKOK: The coronavirus pandemic has generated overwhelming support for the closure of markets selling illegal wildlife across Southeast Asia, an epicenter of the multi-billion-dollar trade, the World Wildlife Fund said in a public opinion poll on Monday (Apr 6).

About 93 per cent of about 5,000 people surveyed by WWF in March across three Southeast Asian nations as well as Hong Kong and Japan said unregulated markets selling wildlife should be shuttered to ward off future pandemics.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Scientists believe the virus that has upturned the lives of billions across the globe originated in a wildlife market, likely in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where bats, pangolins, and other animals known to transmit coronaviruses are crammed together in fetid conditions.

READ: 'Animals live for man': China's appetite for wildlife likely to survive virus

"This is no longer a wildlife problem. It is a global security and human health and economic problem," Christy Williams, WWF's Asia Pacific Director, said in a news conference, giving results of the survey.

Support for a crackdown on markets was strongest in Myanmar, where wildlife has for years been traded openly in the autonomous regions bordering China, while a third of respondents in Vietnam said the crisis had prompted them to stop consuming wildlife products.

Advertisement

Advertisement

"COVID is a wake-up call," Grace Hwa, Illegal Wildlife Trade Programme Manager at WWF Myanmar, said in a statement. "The rampant unchecked trade in wildlife is a risk not only to health and the economy, but to the entire stability of the region."

In the wake of the outbreak, which began in Wuhan and has since spanned the globe, China introduced a ban on all farming and consumption of live wildlife, but it does not cover the trade in animals as pets, and for traditional medicine.

READ: China bans wildlife trade nationwide due to Wuhan virus outbreak

Vietnams prime minister has ordered the agriculture ministry to draft a similar directive, banning wildlife trade and consumption.

Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for the UN office on drugs and crime, said some of the trade had been driven underground.

"Im really concerned about the special Read More – Source