CENTRAL: Hong Kong street where shops keep a dizzying array of dried produce, one highly-valued ingredient is still being sold despite being subject to an international ban: deep-fried scales of endangered pangolins.
The reclusive pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has become the most trafficked mammal on Earth due to soaring demand in China and Vietnam.
While its scales are prized for their supposed medicinal properties in treating everything from acne to liver disease and cancer, its flesh is considered a delicacy.
Hong Kong has an unenviable reputation for trading in several controversial, banned or endangered commodities including ivory, shark fin, rhino horn and tiger parts, and critics routinely accuse the territory of failing to do enough to stamp out such practices.
Commercial breeding is unfeasible because pangolins are picky eaters, prone to disease and easily stressed. Their average survival rate in captivity is less than five years compared to 20 years in the wild.
Hong Kong is a top destination for illegal pangolin shipments because there is demand from local residents, and the semi-autonomous city also functions as a first stop for onward smuggling to southern mainland China.
In September 2016, all 182 member nations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) agreed to move pangolins into the highest protection category banning all trade.
Previously, Cites allowed for trade in pangolins but under strict conditions.
“If Hong Kong was following Cites guidelines and implementing the policy decisions made in 2016, then this would no longer be happening in 2018,” said Astrid Andersson, founder of Hong Kong for Pangolins.
Updated sentencing guidelines taking effect in May will increase the maximum jail term for trafficking and possession of endangered species from two to 10 years, but the law is rarely enforced and the city has come under fire for some relatively lax penalties for Cites violations in the past.
“A slap-on-the-wrist fine from Hong Kong authorities is not uncommon for smugglers, who generally avoid trafficking their illegal wildlife products straight into mainland China because of much heavier sentences there,” said Alex Hofford, wildlife campaigner for WildAid.
Hong Kong’s Customs and Excise Department told AFP it is committed to combating smuggling activities and conducts checks on “passengers, cargoes, postal packets and conveyances at various control points and sea boundaries”.
