The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter it
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Hurst, £20.00
The trafficking of wild animals is one of the world’s most lucrative transnational crimes, valued at up to $23 billion a year. Thousands of species are viewed as money-making commodities, from elephants poached for their ivory and rhinos for their horns, to the humble pangolin, the most trafficked animal, whose scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Vanda Felbab-Brown’s compelling study, The Extinction Market, provides a thorough account of the challenges in tackling a complex phenomenon. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, Felbab-Brown draws on her extensive knowledge of the global drug trade to provide a comparative study on fighting poaching and wildlife trafficking.
