At a time when the dramatic rise in global food prices has created a deep concern about the standards of living of the poorest around the world, a recent study on the traffic in wildlife products points out the crucial role it plays sustaining the livelihood of tens of millions among those poor.

The report also emphasizes the importance of recognized and enforced property rights to create the incentives for enhanced wildlife trading as a source of income, and to prevent threatened over-hunting and usage of these resources.

The study, Trading Nature, sponsored by World Wildlife Fund, estimates that all legal international wildlife traffic has a market value of almost $300 billion.

The following table summarizes the breakdown of the dollar value of wildlife trade in 2005, the last year for which there is detailed data:

While it varies significantly from country-to-country among the underdeveloped nations, wildlife trading can contribute a large amount to the incomes of the poor. For example, in the East African nation of Uganda lake fisheries annually generate revenues of over $200 million, and employ 135,000 fisherman, and 700,000 small-scale processing operators.

In the Cameroon in West Africa, one-third of the people in the Oku Mountain region partly earn their livelihood from collecting the bark of the African Cherry Prunus africana for sale to the international pharmaceutical industry.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, tens of thousands of poor farmers and small traders make their living by selling fuel wood.

It is estimated that just in Asia and the Pacific region between 200 million to 1 billion people earn at least a part of their income from wildlife resources.

Among the poor who would otherwise have daily incomes of only $1, wildlife product trafficking can make the difference between starvation and a reasonable family diet. In Cambodia, for instance, resin collection for the boat industry can bring in an extra $38-50 of monthly family income.

In Peru the capture and sale of a rare fish like the Silver Arowana can supplement someone’s income by up to $230, where normally the average daily wage can be as low as $2-3.

What prevents these sources of income from being even greater, and at the same time preventing the overuse or over-killing of wildlife, the report argues, is the lack of secure property rights in many of these areas of the world:

The reality, however, is that without secure ownership, or exclusive access rights, there is little incentive for local people to invest in the long term sustainability of the wildlife resource – far better to exploit it while it is there and before others do the same . . . This leads to classic ‘boom and bust’ pattern patterns of development with resources being rapidly depleted in one area and then harvest and trade moving on elsewhere.

More secure property rights over wildlife resources would not only create greater incentives for conservation, it would also supply the security for people to be willing to make capital investments and undertake land improvements that would raise the productivity and profitability of wildlife trading over time.

The report explains that what is needed is for a greater recognition and enforcement of property riights that would restrict poaching of wildlife on private property, and that would eliminate "open-access" harvesting of marketable plants and resources on land that is privately owned or which can be privatized.

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