The elephant and ivory trade in Thailand (PDF, 800 KB) - Traffic

Appendix 1.Thailand and the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS)
By Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC
The Thai government’s participation in the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), one of the two
formal monitoring systems for elephants under CITES, has been rather erratic and incomplete overall.
Through Resolution Conf. 10.10 (Rev. CoP12), CITES Parties have been obligated to report the details of
elephant product seizures to the CITES Secretariat or to TRAFFIC directly for inclusion in ETIS since
1997. As of 15 April 2008, the ETIS data set for Thailand comprised 55 seizure cases, but most of these
cases were received from credible NGO sources in the country rather than from reports submitted directly
by the government agencies themselves. Further, since 2004, no seizure cases have been reported by any
sources at all. Consequently, the rate of reporting elephant product seizure data to ETIS remains rather
poor. In the meantime, over the period 1989-2006, Thailand was identified as either a source country (the
exporter or re-exporter), or the destination country in 314 other ivory seizure cases that were made in other
countries around the world. Collectively, these seizures represent 15 660 kg of ivory, most of which is
believed to have originated from African Elephants.
To understand and interpret the data in ETIS correctly, it is necessary to assess not only the rates of
reporting of individual countries, but also to have some means to measure law enforcement effort with
respect to policing ivory trade at the national level. In this regard, as a proxy measure, ETIS looks at the
ratio of the number of seizures a country itself makes in relation to the total number of seizures in which
the country is implicated. The current data set gives Thailand a law enforcement effort ratio of only 14.9%,
meaning that other countries are seizing ivory from Thailand over six times more frequently than Thailand
is seizing ivory itself. In ETIS, Thailand’s law enforcement effort ratio comparatively continues to reflect
rather ineffective law enforcement effort overall. Another means to assess law enforcement effort and
efficiency in ETIS, is the use of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) produced by the Transparency
International. Using a one to ten scale, this index is a comparative annual assessment of the perception of
corruption in various countries around the world. High scores are indicative of low levels of corruption
while low scores are indicative of a greater perception of corruption. Thailand’s CPI scores range from 1.9
in the years 1989-1992 to 3.8 in 2006, indicating progressive improvement over time but nonetheless
suggesting that high levels of corruption may be an important issue affecting implementation of CITES in
the country. And finally, ETIS uses a comparative measure of the scale of individual ivory markets and the
degree of their regulation to produce a market score. Using the data included in the ETIS analysis to
CoP14, Thailand’s domestic market score in ETIS has improved over earlier iterations, but nonetheless it
remains extremely high reflecting a large-scale, poorly regulated ivory market in the country. As a
percentage of the total possible score for the domestic ivory market score in the three ETIS analyses to date,
Thailand scored 100% in 2002 (13 out of 13), 92% in 2004 (16.5 out of 18) and 85% in 2007 (17 out of
20). This demonstrates some margin of improvement, but the overwhelming fact is that Thailand still has
the greatest composite domestic market score of any country assessed by ETIS.
With these variables, Thailand has remained a country of concern in three successive comprehensive
analyses of the ETIS data which have been reported to the CITES Conference of the Parties (see CoP12
Doc. 34.1 Annex 1; CoP13 Doc. 29.2 Annex; and CoP14 Doc. 53.2 Annex 1). Using a statistical technique
known as cluster analysis to group countries in terms of their roles and characteristics in the illicit trade in
ivory, Thailand has continually been amongst the most prominent problematic countries. To illustrate, in
the ETIS report to CITES CoP14, the following description was given for Thailand:
The elephant and ivory trade in Thailand
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