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Increasing pressure on express delivery firms in China to ban wildlife trade
来源： 编辑：编辑部 发布：2020/04/02 10:25:08
CHINA's top e-commerce and express delivery operators face mounting pressure from the government to become de facto enforcers of the country's temporary ban on the trade in wildlife as the fallout over the coronavirus continues.
The country's Ministry of Transport has ordered express delivery companies to be the first line of defence in stopping transport of live animals and other wildlife products, requiring them to take extra care to inspect packages before they are shipped, reported Aljazeera.
The ban was imposed in late January as cases of Covid-19 surged in Wuhan, where the now global pandemic was suspected to have originated in the wildlife trade or from animals trafficked into the country from abroad.
At the same time, however, conservation groups are calling on China to fully overhaul the way it governs the country's lucrative business in order to give firms more clarity over what to target when they discover any potentially illegal activity.
In the first month of the ban, e-commerce platforms aided in the removal, deletion or blocking of information relating to 140,000 wildlife products from bush meat to animal parts used in traditional Chinese medicine, and closed down 17,000 accounts associated with the trade, an official from China's State Council said in late February.
China has pledged to revise the laws governing the wildlife trade, although the changes appear to only target the consumption of meat from wildlife.
China has promised to crack down on the trade in illegal wildlife, estimated to be valued at US$74 billion in 2017, urging people not to eat wild animals, since the coronavirus first surfaced.
"Right now, there isn't enough regulation specifying the responsibility of online platforms," China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation head Zhou Jinfeng told Al Jazeera.
"If they don't play their role and are not able to step up their monitoring mechanisms, stopping online wildlife trade will be difficult," he said. "I hope the government can come up with rules to urge online platforms to take their responsibility."
Over the past few weeks Zhou's group and a network of volunteers have been helped by companies like Alibaba,Tencent, JD.com and others in a "Wildlife Free Ecommerce" campaign targeting online sales, as well as hunting tools such as bird-catching nets, bird-call machines, wildlife snares and traps and torches specifically used for hunting scorpions.
Mr Zhou is also pressing authorities in Beijing to implement a corporate social credit system to reward or punish e-commerce companies for their part in combatting the illegal wildlife trade and hopes that by pressuring the leading companies they will be able to set the example for other smaller players.
Key will be changing China's licensing system, which until the recent ban had allowed 54 species of wildlife and the meat and animals parts to be legally raised, sold and traded.
Steve Blake, head of the Beijing office for non-profit group WildAid has been working with Tencent and other platforms in recent years on how to combat the trade, but says companies faced difficulties not only because of the uncertainty over whether it was legal but also because of data privacy issues.
Mr Blake says the government needs to clarify what species are off-limits and upgrade its laws to provide for better enforcement.
Central to managing the trade is also being able to trace and track the sale of all wildlife, as the Covid-19 outbreak was thought to have stemmed from the creatures being sold at the Wuhan market in Hubei province, the epicentre of China's virus outbreak.
Pangolins, bats and other wildlife known to transmit coronaviruses have been named as possible carriers of Covid-19, but no evidence has been provided by China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention or other health authorities in the country to pinpoint the exact source.
China's authorities have not provided any information regarding the epidemiological investigation into the Wuhan South China Seafood Market where the virus possibly jumped from animals to humans, sites where animals were raised or the supply chains, a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson told Al Jazeera.
The country's Ministry of Transport has ordered express delivery companies to be the first line of defence in stopping transport of live animals and other wildlife products, requiring them to take extra care to inspect packages before they are shipped, reported Aljazeera.
The ban was imposed in late January as cases of Covid-19 surged in Wuhan, where the now global pandemic was suspected to have originated in the wildlife trade or from animals trafficked into the country from abroad.
At the same time, however, conservation groups are calling on China to fully overhaul the way it governs the country's lucrative business in order to give firms more clarity over what to target when they discover any potentially illegal activity.
In the first month of the ban, e-commerce platforms aided in the removal, deletion or blocking of information relating to 140,000 wildlife products from bush meat to animal parts used in traditional Chinese medicine, and closed down 17,000 accounts associated with the trade, an official from China's State Council said in late February.
China has pledged to revise the laws governing the wildlife trade, although the changes appear to only target the consumption of meat from wildlife.
China has promised to crack down on the trade in illegal wildlife, estimated to be valued at US$74 billion in 2017, urging people not to eat wild animals, since the coronavirus first surfaced.
"Right now, there isn't enough regulation specifying the responsibility of online platforms," China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation head Zhou Jinfeng told Al Jazeera.
"If they don't play their role and are not able to step up their monitoring mechanisms, stopping online wildlife trade will be difficult," he said. "I hope the government can come up with rules to urge online platforms to take their responsibility."
Over the past few weeks Zhou's group and a network of volunteers have been helped by companies like Alibaba,Tencent, JD.com and others in a "Wildlife Free Ecommerce" campaign targeting online sales, as well as hunting tools such as bird-catching nets, bird-call machines, wildlife snares and traps and torches specifically used for hunting scorpions.
Mr Zhou is also pressing authorities in Beijing to implement a corporate social credit system to reward or punish e-commerce companies for their part in combatting the illegal wildlife trade and hopes that by pressuring the leading companies they will be able to set the example for other smaller players.
Key will be changing China's licensing system, which until the recent ban had allowed 54 species of wildlife and the meat and animals parts to be legally raised, sold and traded.
Steve Blake, head of the Beijing office for non-profit group WildAid has been working with Tencent and other platforms in recent years on how to combat the trade, but says companies faced difficulties not only because of the uncertainty over whether it was legal but also because of data privacy issues.
Mr Blake says the government needs to clarify what species are off-limits and upgrade its laws to provide for better enforcement.
Central to managing the trade is also being able to trace and track the sale of all wildlife, as the Covid-19 outbreak was thought to have stemmed from the creatures being sold at the Wuhan market in Hubei province, the epicentre of China's virus outbreak.
Pangolins, bats and other wildlife known to transmit coronaviruses have been named as possible carriers of Covid-19, but no evidence has been provided by China's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention or other health authorities in the country to pinpoint the exact source.
China's authorities have not provided any information regarding the epidemiological investigation into the Wuhan South China Seafood Market where the virus possibly jumped from animals to humans, sites where animals were raised or the supply chains, a World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson told Al Jazeera.