Vietnam's oldest national park, Cuc Phuong, dates only to 1962. This limestone karst landscape provides habitat for about 135 mammal species/ Pululante
Illegal poaching is decimating this Southeast Asian country’s incredible biodiversity.
By Kim O'Connell
In June 2018, a Vietnamese court sentenced Hoang Tuan Hai to four-and-a-half years in prison—an outcome that took activists nearly four years to achieve. Hai’s crime was illegal wildlife trafficking—namely the taking of marine turtles. As part of the sting operation that brought Hai to justice, an estimated 7,000 individual turtles—mostly of the hawksbill species—were confiscated from warehouses used by Hai, his brother, and other associates.
Wildlife trafficking is one of the most pressing concerns facing Vietnam’s national park system, whose 30 parks contain mountainous and coastal landscapes and rich biodiversity. Yet the consequences of rampant poaching have been devastating for wildlife. In 2010, the last rhinoceros was killed in Cat Tien National Park, and many forests are virtually empty of wildlife and eerily silent. The national parks are often the only hope of protection for vulnerable species, and yet some of these parks are what observers call “paper parks”—parks in name only—without adequate law enforcement and conservation-minded management. This is in part because the park system is relatively young, and the country is still grappling with the pressures that come with globalization.
“There may not be a tiger left in Vietnam,” says Earl Possardt, marine turtle program officer for the International Division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Elephants are a small population. Turtles have been hit hard. Everything is a diminished but there’s still a lot of habitat left.”
In the more than 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam has developed rapidly across several fronts, with normalized trade relations with the U.S. and other nations and an increasingly robust international tourism industry. The country’s oldest national park, Cuc Phuong, dates only to 1962 and was dedicated by then-North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh himself. This limestone karst landscape provides habitat for about 135 mammal species (including the clouded leopard, Asian black bears, and the Delacour’s langur) and more than 330 bird species. Other popular parks include Cat Tien, a lowland forest landscape in the southern part of the country; Con Dao, an island park and turtle haven; and Bach Mã, site of the stunning Do Quyen waterfall.
Informants have found leopard cats being advertised for sale online or exhibited in restaurants or other places before they are rescued and released back into the wild/ENV
Until recently, however, wildlife traffickers have not been adequately pursued or punished, and government corruption has been rampant, according to Quyen Vu, executive director of Education for Nature – Vietnam (ENV), the non-governmental organization that led the effort to nab and prosecute Hoang Tuan Hai.
Since 2000, ENV has focused on education and outreach to raise awareness of wildlife trafficking and reduce demand for illegal wildlife products, which flow both out of and into Vietnam and include rhino horns, pangolin scales, and bear bile that are used in traditional Asian medicine, cuisine, and other uses. The organization maintains a trafficking hotline for informants and has staged elaborate undercover sting operations to corner traffickers. There is some potential danger for informants too. According to National Geographic reporting, a Vietnamese investigative journalist was beaten in 2016 after reporting on the turtle investigation that led to Hai’s arrest.
Exacerbating the depleting effects of trafficking is simply rampant development.
“The U.S. is a huge country with a relatively tiny population,” says Vu. “Vietnam is a tiny country with a huge population.” (Vietnam’s estimated population in 2019 is about 97 million people, with a density of 291 people per square kilometer, versus the United States, which has an average density of only 35 people per square kilometer.) Development pushes right up to and even past the park’s already porous borders. According to a recent report in the New York Times, a major tourism corporation is currently expanding a manicured lakeside resort in the heart of the Thung Nam Bird Park, in just one example. As one TripAdvisor commenter wrote after visiting Thung Nam, “We saw a peacock and a wild boar in a tiny cage….Other than that, the place is currently under construction….no birds.”
Just as in the United States, tourism is both a blessing and a curse. Although increasing numbers of international tourists are coming to Vietnam for wildlife excursions, which ought to promote conservation, more visitors likely mean even more potentially destructive construction of lodging and businesses to support those tourists.
Groups like ENV, IUCN Vietnam, the World Wildlife Fund, and USFWS’s International Division have all turned their attention to the wildlife crisis in Vietnam. Earl Possardt, for example, has worked with ENV and other conservation groups, as well as Vietnam’s coastal communities, to identify and protect coastal turtle nesting sites along the heavily fished coastline of Vietnam.
“Over the past ten years, I can almost feel a palpable change, like something that’s changing with attitudes [about trafficking],” Possardt says. “Eighty percent of the Vietnamese population lives on the coast. It’s a wall of nets and lagoons, and you wonder how the fish navigate through there. It’s a very intense use of resources.”
So changing attitudes toward sensitive wildlife could have widespread positive effects.
To this end, Possardt points to the Indian Ocean–South-East Asian Marine Turtle Memorandum of Understanding, a non-binding intergovernmental agreement that aims to protect and recover sea turtles in Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, as an important guideline for the work he and others are doing. Significantly, an annual conference among the agreement’s signatory nations will be held this October in Vietnam, a chance for Vietnamese leaders to walk the talk.
A man holds a rescued marine turtle, among the most heavily trafficked animals along Vietnam’s abundant coastline, before returning it to the sea/ENV
ENV’s Vu—who maintains a home base in the United States but travels frequently to Vietnam, as does her husband Douglas Hendrie, ENV’s wildlife crime coordinator—also believes attitudes are changing. When we met for this article, she showed me the newest anti-trafficking PSA that ENV had commissioned, the latest in a series that Vu says has made an impact.
Recently, ENV lobbied for the successful updating of the nation’s penal code, upping the maximum sentence for wildlife trafficking from 7 years to 15, and the new PSA shows a dramatization of a family being ripped apart when the father is sent to prison for trafficking.
Then there was the high-profile incarceration of Hai, which surely sent a strong message to others that poaching and trafficking would not be met with a blind eye as it was in the past. As Vu says, "Every case like that changes the dynamic of the whole country.”
Add comment