The illegal traffic in the skins of endangered animals, ivory and rain forest timber is growing and profitable in the booming environmental crime business.

Every year criminal syndicates are profiting by more than 10 billion dollars as they poach and smuggle illegal natural products into markets willing to pay for them.

A British based charity, the Environmental Investigation Agency, says that international gangs are making profit margins of over 700 percent on illegal items such as Tiger skins.

The EIA is concerned that national and international law enforcement agencies are ignoring the severity of the illegal traffic and are doing little if anything to stop it.

The EIA report is naming names and they are not pulling any punches.

At the top of their list is an Indian citizen, Sansar Chand, who, according to the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations, has sold more than 12 thousand animal skins to traders based in Nepal. The report says that Chand has dealt in 400 Tiger and 2 thousand Leopard skins which have a market value in China of over 10 million dollars.

Chand has been in jail in India since 2005.

In Africa a businessman, Benson Nkunika, has confessed to being involved in the poaching of 38 Elephants for their ivory. The Zambia Wildlife Authority reports that Mkunika was working in collusion with the Game Warden of Zambia’s famous South Luangwa National Park.

The trading of ivory was globally banned in 1989 and since then it has become a lucrative item as an illegal product.

“It is clear the ivory trade is growing among organized criminals because of the increasing numbers of large seizures we are seeing,” said Mary Rice, Director of EIA. “That is reflected in the trade in wild cat skins and illegal logging. Seizures in the 1990s were typically of far smaller volumes.”

The EIA report suggests that as governments attempt to regulate protection of endangered species they don’t often follow up with effective enforcement. This creates opportunity for criminal syndicates.

“Environmental crime generates tens of billions of dollars in profits for criminal enterprises every year, and it is growing,” according to the EIA report.

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