The Economist (20140118) by The Economist Group

Author:The Economist Group
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: Economist
Published: 2014-01-17T00:36:23.558000+00:00

International

Organised crime: Earning with the fishes

Skills and youth: All hands on deck

Livestock farming: Meat and greens

Livestock diseases: On the zoonose

Organised crime

Earning with the fishes

As globalised gangs profit from new regulations and markets, governments are struggling to keep up

Jan 18th 2014 | LONDON AND NEW YORK | From the print edition

SOME lawmen chase villains down mean streets. Others chase fraudsters across balance-sheets. In the stomach-churning stench of the Vetport at John F. Kennedy International Airport, yet others don surgical masks, goggles and rubber gloves, and peer with penlights into crates holding thousands of little birds.

These inspectors with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) examine not just live animals entering America—such as the 45 outlaw jays they found lurking in a legal shipment of thousands of birds—but plants and animal products such as handbags and caviar. In 2011 FWS agents raided Gibson Guitar facilities in Tennessee and seized wood worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that they suspected had been illegally imported from India and Madagascar.

The buyers may be besotted ornithophiles, air-brained fashionistas or greedy gourmets. But the sellers are crooks, supplying a market which, according to America’s Congressional Research Service, is worth as much as $133 billion annually. Commodities such as rhino horn and caviar offer criminals two benefits rarely found together: high prices and low risk. Rhino horn can fetch up to $50,000 per kilogram, more than gold or the American street value of cocaine. Get caught bringing a kilogram of cocaine into America and you could face 40 years in prison and a $5m fine. On January 10th, by contrast, a New York court sentenced a rhino-horn trafficker to just 14 months.

The appeal of such trade is increased, however unwittingly, by governments trying harder to protect what is precious and rare. “When we finally get it together to agree that we’ll only take ten tuna out of the water this year because that’s all we can afford to take, that 11th tuna will be worth a lot of money,” says Theodore Leggett of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). As with tuna, so with ebony, ivory and rhino horn—all being regulated more tightly, and all still desirable.

The world is their oyster

Organised crime is globalising and diversifying. Mono-ethnic, hierarchical mafias are being replaced by multi-ethnic networks that operate across borders and commit many types of offence. In an ongoing investigation into rhino-horn trafficking, the FWS arrested Irish travellers using indigent Texans to procure material for Chinese and Vietnamese buyers. Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, estimates that just a quarter of Europe’s roughly 3,600 organised-crime groups have a main nationality, and that some operate in dozens of countries. A third are involved in more than one criminal enterprise, with half of those linked to drug-trafficking.

And though traditional trafficking in drugs, guns and people is still lucrative, gangs are increasingly moving into lower-risk, higher-reward areas—not just wildlife, but fraud and illegal waste-disposal. The UNODC says the value of cross-border trade in counterfeit goods could be as much as $250 billion a year.

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