Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (52 page)

Cong’s claim to have used rhino horn to help ameliorate the after-effects of too much rice wine seemed scarcely credible, at first. But the further I travelled, the more frequently I heard the story. And in the months that followed, there was increasing evidence of a disturbing shift in the Vietnamese consumer market.

It has been dubbed the ‘Ferrari factor’.

‘The new rich want luxury goods that are rare, exotic and expensive as indicators of their success,’ says Doug Hendrie, an advisor to ENV. ‘These values, in addition to the fact that rhino horn is supposed to be good for you, may be driving the surge here in Vietnam.’

Popular Vietnamese websites, including one linked to an official government newspaper, carry articles touting rhino horn’s supposed ability to ‘improve concentration and cure hangovers’. ‘Rhino horn with wine is the alcoholic drink of millionaires,’ proclaims an article on the website
viet-bao.com
. Another describes rhino horn as ‘like a luxury car’.

Vietnam’s
nouveau riche
are monied, trendy and ostentatious. It is not uncommon to see a bright yellow Ferrari or a Porsche lumbering cautiously through the chaotic crowds of bicycles and scooters in Hanoi’s Old Quarter.
Designer labels and stores crowd the air-conditioned frenzy of the Vincom Towers shopping mall in the centre of the city: Prada, Valentino, Hugo Boss, Givenchy, Armani, Pierre Cardin, Dr. Martens and Longines. There’s even an Ecko Unltd store with its distinctive red-and-black rhino logo. The centre-piece of the shop is a plastic rhino. But unlike in South Africa – where the company has put up giant billboards cashing in on the poaching crisis – not a word of protest is evident here.

In Vietnam, rhino horn has been elevated to a status symbol. It is hugely expensive and, theoretically, illegal. Those with money want it, not only for its perceived health benefits, but also because it has such an illicit appeal. Displaying a horn on a shelf or a table is both an overt statement of wealth and one of untouchability. There are stories of businessmen and government officials drinking brandy from carved rhino horn cups or whole horns being displayed in homes on the altars that families use to pay respect to their ancestors.

Nguyen Huong Giang is one of the new wealthy. The twenty-four-year-old lives in a modern high-rise with wooden floors and expensive furnishings. She carries an iPhone and wears tastefully extravagant jewellery. In March 2012, she openly discussed her use of rhino horn in an interview with an Associated Press stringer, Mike Ives. Unlike many others, she had no qualms about being identified and was clearly unconcerned about possible repercussions. She even agreed to be photographed preparing a rhino horn elixir.

‘Nguyen Huong Giang loves to party,’ Ives later wrote, ‘but loathes hangovers, so she ends her whiskey benders by tossing back shots of rhino horn ground with water on a special ceramic plate. Her father gave her the 10-centimetre brown horn as a gift, claiming it cures everything from headaches to cancer. Vietnam has become so obsessed with the fingernail-like substance that it now sells for more than cocaine.

‘“I don’t know how much it costs,” said Giang, twenty-four, after showing off the horn in her high-rise apartment overlooking the capital, Hanoi. “I only know it’s very expensive …” [S]he estimates her horn will last another ten to fifteen years. But once her stash is depleted, there may not be any rhinos left on earth to satisfy her craving.’

Vietnam is one of Asia’s ‘rising dragons’, a ‘communist capitalist playground’ that has a seen a dramatic economic transformation in recent decades. On the surface, it is a country reborn – one that has defied the odds and prevailed despite decades of war, the loss of Soviet financial support and a series of crippling economic crises. It has been hailed as a model of economic liberalisation. The country’s first stock exchange was opened in 2000, and seven years later it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Prior to the 2008 global recession, Vietnam had been averaging a remarkable 7 per cent annual growth in its gross domestic product. And, until it finally hit a wall of financial instability brought on by a combination of high inflation, large trade deficits and a weak currency, it was one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.

But Vietnam is also a country in the grip of a paranoid and authoritarian political regime that seems determined to cling to power. Bill Hayton, a BBC reporter and producer who was expelled from the country for his reporting, has described Vietnam as a place where ‘the trappings of freedom are apparent on every street, but from the economy to the media, the Communist Party is determined to remain the sole source of authority’.

Their presence is felt from the flags outside shops to the phalanxes of green-uniformed soldiers and the tinny loudspeakers on street corners that once warned of air raids and now continue to pump out party messages and propaganda. State-owned enterprises still dominate the economy and account for 40 per cent of the total GDP. In the pages of the newspapers there are reports of crackdowns on government opponents.

A few days after my arrival,
Viet Nam News
, the English-language daily, carried an article about a seventy-one-year-old Buddhist activist, Nguyen Van Lia, who had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. His crime: ‘Abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state’. It was not an unusual occurrence. Dozens of other dissidents have received similar jail terms for opaque crimes like distributing ‘anti-state’ leaflets or collaborating with ‘reactionary’ groups.

Vietnam’s spectacular economic growth has come at a price. The impact
on the country’s environment has been devastating. Hayton – in his book
Vietnam: Rising Dragon
– refers to the ‘dogmatic Marxist-derived belief that the environment is just another resource to be used up in the service of humanity’. Scott Roberton says Vietnam’s economic model is, at its heart, driven by a desire ‘to make money, no matter what the cost’.

Increasing affluence has led to a growing demand for rare meats and exotic animals to be eaten or used in traditional medicines. Across Vietnam, restaurants advertising
dac san
or ‘speciality dishes’ abound. Anything from pangolins and civets to snakes, monitor lizards, turtles and deer can be served up. The rarer the animal, the more its flesh is prized. Newspapers have carried lurid tales about the new rich and their wild parties with ‘processions of supercars and sexy music shows by long-legged girls’ at which ‘the meat of endangered animals such as anteater, deer, muntjac, bear and snakes’ is consumed.

Surveys conducted in Hanoi in 2007 and Ho Chi Minh City in 2011 reveal disturbing trends where ‘affluent and highly educated people are more likely to use wild animal products than those with less money and education’. Businessmen and government officials are the most profligate, dining out and treating guests to an array of exotic dishes as a means of enhancing their status.

In Vietnam, the greatest threat to wildlife is human consumption. Estimates suggest that up to 4 500 tons of wild fauna, excluding fish and insects, are used each year as food, medicines and ornaments. Law enforcement efforts have a negligible impact, intercepting between 2 and 5 per cent of the illegal wildlife trade. According to the Hanoi survey, many people found that the consumption of wildlife was ‘appealing despite, or even because of, [its] illegality’. Disconcertingly, the survey found that ‘non-consumers [of wildlife] will potentially become consumers if their standard of living and disposable income increases’.

In May 2011, wildlife inspectors conducted a raid on a restaurant run by the matriarchal ‘kingpin’ of a wildlife trafficking ring in Da Lat, a popular tourist destination in southern Vietnam. Minutes after they left, the woman, Mrs Tu Loan – a matronly sixty-year-old – was back in business and offering to sell rhino horn to an undercover journalist from
Thanh Nien
news.

‘One hundred million [$5 000] for 100 grams. No bargain,’ she reportedly said. ‘I just want to help you. Let me ask a friend of mine to bring the rhino horn here. I used to trade in it, but it has become scarce in the past three years.’ The director of the local forest protection department, Tran Thanh Binh, later told the reporter that Loan was the ‘most infamous wildlife kingpin … in Da Lat’ and ‘any rhino horn [sold in her restaurant] must have been sourced from her, not anyone else’.

Investigations by Roberton and his colleagues at the Wildlife Conservation Society turned up evidence that she ran a zoo in addition to the restaurant and allegedly used it to ‘launder protected species’. The raid was not the first. In August 2010, officials confiscated 300 kilograms of illegal game meat from her restaurant. But despite the raids and mounting evidence, Tu Loan remained in business and untouchable.

You only need to travel to Ha Long Bay, probably one of the most spectacularly beautiful places in the world, to see the damage wrought by rampant development, crass commercialism and uncontrolled tourism. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it consists of hundreds of limestone islets and pillars rising dramatically out of the South China Sea. The bay, with its hundreds of fake Chinese-style junks and cruise boats, attracts close to 2 million tourists a year.

But it is dying. Mangrove forests that once lined the shores and protected the bay by filtering out the soil and pollutants being carried into the sea by rivers and streams have long been stripped. In their place is the ugly concrete of Ha Long City. Just north of Ha Long Bay is Cam Pha, the heart of Vietnam’s coal-mining industry. Coal dust blights the sea. The sludge has become so thick, it can be mined. The tourist boats leak diesel into the water. You can smell it on the sea air as you drift between the islands and see the oily iridescence on the water’s surface.

The cruise lines all boast that their boats are fitted with septic tanks. Many of them are, but few are equipped to process the raw waste, and the onshore facilities are inadequate. The result, as Hayton bluntly puts it, is that ‘the shit of a million and a half boat passengers a year [now closer to two million] is being dumped directly into Ha Long Bay’.

About a thousand people live in four traditional floating villages sheltered by massive limestone karst pillars. Once upon a time, the waters teemed
with fish. But years of overfishing, some of it involving the use of poison, explosives and electric current, has decimated the fish stocks. Most of the fishermen living there now eke out a living from whatever fish they can farm in polluted net pens and from tourism.

Vietnam is a signatory to more international environmental conventions and agreements than most other Southeast Asian countries. But in reality, this has more to do with projecting a favourable image of the country, and saving face, than protecting the environment.

In September 2011, South Africa and Vietnam held bilateral talks in Johannesburg. A media release announced that the countries had ‘agreed on a process towards the finalisition [
sic
] of [a] Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate among others on natural resource management, wildlife protection and law enforcement’. At a press conference – in which the Vietnamese delegation had grudgingly agreed to participate – I asked Ha Cong Tuan, the then deputy director of Vietnam’s forestry administration, about the persistent myth that rhino horn could cure cancer and rumours that its use had been endorsed by a senior Vietnamese government official.

His response was telling. ‘I can publicly declare that it is a rumour in Vietnam,’ he said through an interpreter. ‘Me, myself personally, and others as well, hear that rhino horn can cure cancer. Personally I don’t believe in that statement or rumour and we already requested that a medical research institution … verify if rhino horn can cure cancer and make [the findings] public’.

‘You have to look at comments like that within the Vietnam political context,’ says a leading conservationist who works in Vietnam, but doesn’t want to be named. ‘People will often say something in a meeting by beginning with the statement: “In my opinion …” In effect that allows them to say anything they want with absolutely no accountability. If the person is ever questioned about the statement, he can simply say: “I made it clear that I was speaking in my personal capacity.” It is something that is very common in the government workshops we do. Often, I have to step in and tell an official that I don’t want to hear their personal opinion and that they are there representing their department and I’d like them to speak on behalf of the department. Usually they then have nothing to say.’

Tuan, who subsequently became Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, concluded his response with assurances that Vietnam has ‘laws and regulations in compliance with CITES’, and that ‘we are well aware of the importance of biodiversity conservation’. He added that Vietnam’s own ‘rhino population is very small, nearly extinguished … We are making our best effort to conserve wildlife,’ he said. The following month came the announcement that Vietnam’s last Javan rhino was dead.

Tuan made no mention of the fact that Vietnam had been censured by CITES for non-compliance on three recent occasions. Nor did he address the fact that the country’s wildlife legislation is widely regarded as contradictory, riddled with loopholes and poorly implemented. Enforcement agencies are notoriously corrupt, and there is growing evidence that customs agents seize shipments of contraband wildlife not because they are illegal, but because they can make money out of them.