- In 2019, Malawi dismantled the Chinese-led Lin-Zhang wildlife trafficking syndicate, a major win in its fight against the illegal wildlife trade, thanks in part to funding from the U.S. government.
- The Trump administration’s recent slashing of international development funds, however, threatens these gains, leaving frontline enforcers and conservation programs without critical support.
- NGOs across Africa and Southeast Asia, running initiatives from sniffer rat programs to antipoaching patrols, tell Mongabay they’re struggling to fill the funding gap.
- Experts warn that without urgent alternative, and sustainable, sources of funding, heavily trafficked species like elephants, rhinos and tigers could face accelerated declines.
In 2019, Malawi registered a massive win in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade. Intelligence-driven operations culminated in the arrest of more than a dozen members of the Chinese-led “Lin-Zhang gang,” one of Southern Africa’s most prolific trafficking syndicates.
Found to be in possession of hundreds of pieces of elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales and hippo teeth, the traffickers were sentenced to between 18 months and 14 years in prison.
The case was hailed as a milestone in Malawi’s growing capacity to curb wildlife crime. With help from international donors, the country has set up a forest and landscape monitoring center, trained police, judicial and anticorruption officials on forest and wildlife crime, and achieved major reductions in elephant ivory and pangolin scale trafficking — not bad for a nation with a GDP per capita of $602 a year.
Such progress, however, is now in jeopardy following the Trump administration’s sudden shutdown earlier this year of USAID and its sweeping freezes of conservation grant programs administered through several federal agencies.
U.S. funds channeled through NGOs in Malawi have helped equip frontline law enforcers and strengthen wildlife laws, according to Brighton Kumchedwa, director of Malawi’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife. Taking down the Chinese syndicate, he told Mongabay, “would not have been possible” without this assistance.
But in Malawi and elsewhere, the abrupt cuts now threaten to diminish this momentum, thrusting wildlife officials into what Kumchedwa describes as a “difficult situation.”
The illicit wildlife trade is the world’s fourth-largest criminal enterprise, worth between $7 billion and $23 billion a year, and is contributing to the global extinction crisis now underway.
The U.S. government has spent millions tackling this trade through grants administered by USAID, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL). The funds are mandated by the U.S. Congress through laws such as the Endangered Species Act and species-specific statutes aimed at African elephants, great apes, marine turtles, and tigers and rhinos, leading observers to challenge the legitimacy and legality of a president suddenly halting the financial flow.
“It’s just reversing decades of so much progress,” said Sulma Warne, who was senior technical adviser at USAID End Wildlife Crime, a Bangkok-based program that was terminated following the dismantling of USAID, its major funder. “The traffickers are going to have more space to operate, and it’s just going to put these species back on a path of extinction.”
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire spearheading Trump’s campaign to cut or dismantle certain U.S. agencies, has gloated about “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” and called it a “criminal organization,” without offering evidence. But the cuts to initiatives like those in Malawi will make life easier for Chinese organized crime groups, which dominate international wildlife trafficking much as Latin American cartels control international narcotrafficking, according to Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International, an NGO that investigates wildlife crime.
“Less work on wildlife crime by NGOs and global government authorities supported by the U.S. means more opportunities for Chinese transnational trafficking networks, as well as less pressure on the Chinese government to change things and enforce its own laws,” Crosta told Mongabay. “It has also become more difficult to apply pressure on China in public forums and at a diplomatic level now that the U.S. has disengaged from this issue.”
Sniffer animals, field patrols and criminal investigation curtailed
In Tanzania, APOPO, a nonprofit, had recently received $100,000 from USAID as part of two-year grant to expand a program that aims to use African giant pouched rats (Cricetomys ansorgei) to detect wildlife products in airports and seaports. Then in March, the funds were terminated.
Trials of the program have had to be paused while the group seeks alternative funding from private donors and other countries. “We really hope that we don’t have to abort the program,” Apopo CEO Christophe Cox told Mongabay. “But of course, getting funding at this moment is very challenging, because … so many organizations [like] ours are in crisis.”
APOPO also has a land mine detection program in Zimbabwe, which uses sniffer rats and dogs, that has had to stop work and fire people after the U.S. froze its funds, Cox said.
In Indonesia, the Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN) operates a team of sniffer dogs at seaports on Java Island through which traffickers smuggle animals from neighboring Sumatra. Suspension of the INL grant that funded its operations effectively brought them to a close in early February, JAAN director Benvica Iben told Mongabay.
“Many animals from Sumatra … are now being smuggled into Java again,” he said. “There is still security in place [at seaports], but they rely on human security personnel, which we consider less effective.”
In Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem, a richly forested landscape home to elephants, rhinos, tigers and orangutans, an NGO run by the Goldman Prize-winning biologist Rudi Putra has had to scale back antipoaching patrols following the freezing of a USFWS grant.
Indonesia already has a shortage of forest rangers, so the NGO patrols are essential to prevent Leuser’s iconic wildlife from being plundered by poachers, Rudi said. To plug the immediate gap created by the loss of U.S. funds, his team has reallocated budget that was earmarked for expanding its activities through the construction of a new field station.
“If patrols stop, it will have serious consequences, so we are making every effort to secure alternative funding,” Rudi told Mongabay.
WWF has said that Indonesia has only about one-sixth of the rangers it would need to adequately patrol its protected rainforests, which have been heavily damaged by encroachers. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto recently slashed the Ministry of Forestry’s budget by 30% as part of his own “efficiency” drive.
NGOs like Rudi’s play a vital role in Indonesia’s conservation ecosystem, according to Dwi Nugroho Adhiasto, a veteran of counterwildlife trafficking in Indonesia, now with the Science for Endangered and Trafficked Species (SCENTS) Foundation.
“In many cases, NGOs provide initial intelligence [on wildlife crime], which is then followed up by forestry officials, police and other agencies,” Dwi told Mongabay. Scaling back these efforts would therefore undermine law enforcement, he said. “This is especially concerning as the government is cutting ministry budgets, which could reduce funding for detection and training as well.”
Read more: Snared, skinned, sold: Brutal March for Indonesia’s Sumatran tigers
In Thailand, while the government covers salaries and basic equipment for most of the country’s forest patrols, U.S.-backed NGOs such as the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) provide additional training, field costs and technical support, bolstering morale among rangers, according to Anak Pattanavibool, former director at WCS Thailand. “The funding has kept some good people to fight with bad guys here,” he told Mongabay.
These antipoaching units have helped to recover Indochinese tiger numbers in Thailand’s flagship Western Forest Complex. The subspecies, Panthera tigris corbetti, has already died out in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
In a previous role at WCS Indonesia, Dwi helped set up the Wildlife Crime Unit program, which works with law enforcement to stop traffickers. In one of its many successes, the program helped authorities in North Sumatra use criminal network mapping and undercover operations to stop a prominent online trafficker named Vast Haris Nugroho, catching him in a 2014 sting operation in the act of trying to sell a baby orangutan.
The extent to which WCS has been affected by the cuts is unclear; the organization did not respond to requests for comment.
The International Rhino Foundation said it faced projected losses of $1 million annually over the next three years due to the funding freeze, affecting efforts to protect critically endangered rhinos in Indonesia and Zimbabwe. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said it had lost funds for initiatives to train rangers, strengthen wildlife laws and convene cross-border intelligence sharing in Malawi and Zambia. In Malawi, “Kasungu National Park’s 350 elephants are more vulnerable to poachers, and 90 rangers won’t receive critical conservation law enforcement training,” IFAW said in a statement.
Observers warned the cuts could trigger the loss of a generation of wildlife crime professionals as the tsunami of job losses creates an oversaturated labor pool. “Even when future job opportunities become available, it will be a very difficult job market,” said one law enforcement consultant with years of experience in international environmental security, who asked to remain anonymous. “I think many experts will consider a career change.”
Can U.S. funds be replaced?
The long involvement of NGOs in countering wildlife crime means that many governments in trafficking-prone regions like Southeast Asia haven’t developed the national institutions, expertise and political will capable of suddenly taking the lead on the illegal wildlife trade, according to K. Yoganand, a conservation biologist based in Cambodia with over a decade of experience in Southeast Asia.
The lack of existing government capacity and resources could lead to efforts to curb illegal wildlife trade simply not being replaced, Yoganand warned, a situation inflamed by the fact that countries are also grappling with U.S. cuts to humanitarian aid on fighting famine, combating the spread of disease, and dealing with natural disasters — not to mention the economic fallout from U.S. tariffs and the prospect of a global recession.
“Some of the humanitarian aid will get replaced by China and some other countries that want to have a better foothold, better influence,” he told Mongabay. “But the impacted wildlife projects, nobody will replace it, because I don’t think for anyone it’s a priority.”
Sources said there is some hope that wealthier nations could replace some of the losses from U.S. sources. For instance, a recently announced 27 million euro ($30 million) EU-funded project is due to support, among other activities, targeted wildlife forensic activities in Southeast Asia to help authorities pin down prosecutions against traffickers. However, with priorities for governments around the world shifting, increased EU public spending on defense might be less likely to offer a bounty of alternative funding.
The dim prospects of future funding mean that competition for funding could magnify existing inequities in the conservation sector. Experts noted that larger organizations have a disproportionate pull on resources compared to smaller local NGOs that are more grounded in local realities and therefore crucial for conservation to be relevant to both nature and communities.
“Now, more than ever, financial support from private foundations and individuals is crucial,” said Crosta from Earth League International. “However, I fear that the large multimillion-dollar NGOs will capture most of this private funding, further expanding their already dominant monopoly on conservation.”
Job losses in tariff-hit industries and a global economic downturn could intensify pressure on wildlife, if people turn increasingly to poaching and illegal logging to pay the bills. This was seen during the coronavirus pandemic, for example, when illegal fishing in the Amazon and hunting for wild meat in India and Indonesia increased.
Securing alternative funding will be a matter of urgency for many organizations and governments fighting wildlife crime. But with the size of the gap created by the U.S. pullbacks, whether they can find enough support in time to save heavily trafficked species like elephants, tigers and rhinos will be critical. Experts fear time may already be running out.
“I don’t know if these species have the time to wait for someone to care,” said Shannon Noelle Rivera, a contract researcher specializing in illegal wildlife trade at USFWS. “I have a feeling that we’re going to see some things disappear faster than we thought.”
Banner image: Community rangers guard elephants in Sera Conservancy, Northern Rangelands, Kenya, 2010. Image by Northern Rangelands Trust / USAID Biodiversity & Forestry via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Reporting by Carolyn Cowan, Spoorthy Raman, Charles Mpaka, Hans Nicholas Jong, Gerald Flynn, Philip Jacobson; writing by Carolyn Cowan; editing by Philip Jacobson.
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