Exploiting the legal system

Looming walls topped with barbed wire dissected rice fields around a private farm in Cambodia, concealing the wildlife breeding operations within.

A welcome sign stated that the farm, Vanny Bio Research, would “not accept any interview from any media”.

The owners and managers of this facility, as well as two Cambodian government officials, were formally charged with wildlife trafficking by United States (US) prosecutors in November. 

US federal court documents allege this “international wildlife smuggling ring” used the legal trade of captive-bred long-tailed macaques to launder thousands of illegally poached wild monkeys from Cambodia into US laboratories, from at least the end of 2017 to the start of 2022. The macaques are regularly traded for the purposes of medical experiments.

“America is the centre of the global trade in primates for research,” said Sarah Kite, co-founder of the animal rights group Action for Primates. “Anything that happens within the American import and export trade will have repercussions on the supply chain throughout the world.”

Cambodia’s dominance of this trade, which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaves researchers boggled and pointing at the country’s murky monkey business.

The US consistently imported the highest number of live macaques from Cambodia during each of the years corruption is alleged, totaling nearly 70,000 monkeys. It’s unclear how many may have been taken from the wild, but prosecutors have hinted at thousands.

But the US was just a layover for these allegedly trafficked animals—whether kept whole or in bits and pieces. Conservationists, like Kite, said labs there routinely dissected Cambodian macaques to re-export hundreds of shipments of dismembered body parts to Canada and across Europe.

This may magnify the potential illegality within the primate trade, since one monkey is likely sliced and diced into multiple types of specimen, from blood to brains. Knowingly or not, the labs re-exporting these specimens could be further laundering macaques poached from the wild in Cambodia, empowering importers to look past the Kingdom’s alleged corruption.

Long-tailed macaques have been the most traded primate for decades because of their use in biomedical research.

The primate industry, worth an estimated USD $1.25 billion, is overseen by a UN trade convention known as CITES, which legalises the commerce through a permit system, animal welfare regulations, breeding requirements, and other rules. But the nearly 50-year-old system is infamous for legal loopholes and data deficiencies.

While Cambodia has farmed macaques for years—with the first CITES-recorded shipment exported to the US in 2005—the Kingdom cornered the market during the pandemic.

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a boom in global imports and exports as nations raced to develop vaccines. Last July, the macaque was uplisted from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the Red List of Threatened Species, which cited “biological use” as a key threat.

As a country, Cambodia traded more than 33,000 live macaques in 2020, more than half of the recorded global macaque trade that year, according to CITES. Nearly seven of every 10 of those monkeys landed in the US.

The indicted Vanny Bio Research is Cambodia’s largest monkey exporter in recent years. The company has strongly denied any wrongdoing. The farm exported more than 40,700 live macaques to the US from 2020 to 2022, according to the head of Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries.

In what Kite called an “ironic tragedy”, the November indictment followed the arrest of an official from the Cambodian Forestry Administration—which enforces CITES within the country—in the US for wildlife trafficking. 

At the time, Masphal Kry, deputy director of wildlife and biodiversity, was on his way to an international meeting about trade regulations for endangered species. His superior, Forestry Administration Director General Omaliss Keo, was also charged in the indictment. To date, he has not been arrested.

These events deepened pre-existing concerns about Cambodia’s macaque exports. They also raise new concerns about the role US labs may be playing in re-laundering allegedly wild-caught animals through specimen exports. 

“If the US is exporting live macaques or specimens from macaques imported from Cambodia, then obviously there are concerns about the origins. Whether they might potentially have been wild-caught,” Kite said. “There are knock-on consequences for any trade involving the US and its import and export of macaques for research.”

The prevalence and profit of the live trade often overshadows the specimen market, which lengthens the supply chain for Cambodian monkeys.

“But there is really no difference between the two trades. In order to get specimens, you have to have the live animal somewhere,” said Nedim Buyukmihci, an emeritus professor of veterinary medicine from the University of California-Davis who published a 2023 paper on animal welfare in labs. “You’re not growing it in a test tube. You’ve got the same impact potentially as in the live trade.”

CITES tracks the import and export of specimens, which are officially defined as “any readily recognizable part” of an animal. The database rarely specifies the part of the macaque. But Buyukmihci said the units used to measure the specimens do provide clues.

Specimens recorded in volume are usually liquids, which he says are likely blood or spinal fluid. Those listed in mass are probably tissue from organs such as the brain, liver, or muscles.

“If you are looking at the actual origins of where these body parts are coming from, then it is difficult to know how many macaques were involved in that trade,” said Kite. She concluded that the number of live macaques involved in the specimen trade “could be huge".

Within the four years prosecutors say wild monkeys were laundered through the legal trade into the US, labs there acted as a main supplier of Cambodian macaque specimens for many western countries.

According to CITES trade data, Canada brought in more than 26,500 millilitres of Cambodian-origin macaque specimens from 2017 to 2019, which was a larger volume than any other country trading with the US.

In addition, trade data recorded the first-ever direct import of live macaques from Cambodia to Canada in 2020 and 2021, to the tune of more than 2,000 animals.

While not the most frequent importer, Italy recorded the largest quantity of imports of any country, with nearly 41,000 specimens  in 2020 and 2021 combined. No units of measurement were noted.

This is all traded for profit. But it’s unclear how large that profit margin is.

“From a consumer perspective, it is quite difficult to question the legitimacy of a particular animal with the documentation,” said Daan Van Uhm, a criminology professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who has studied the E.U. imports of macaques. “It is more in the responsibilities of the country of origin [...] to delve into the legitimacy of the trade.”

As Cambodia leads the global macaque market, the depth of the allegations against its government and largest monkey farm have cast doubt over the entire trade. 

Government officials have steadfastly denied the corruption charges. 

In general, international watchdogs such as Transparency International have long found corruption to be endemic in Cambodia, routinely listing it among the worst in the world on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Regardless, the pandemic surge of macaque exports shocked researchers. The findings of a 2023 study underline the incredulity that Cambodia is meeting market demands legally.

“Our paper is asking more questions than providing answers. We are asking: ‘Is the legal trade serving as a loophole for illegal trade?’” said Anne-Lise Chaber, senior author of the study along with other researchers from Adelaide University. “We provide an element of an answer because the numbers provided to CITES do not match with Cambodia’s farming capabilities.”

One of the only public documents with information about in-country breeding facilities is a leaked 2014 letter from the CITES Management Authority in Cambodia, which until recently was led by the indicted Omaliss.

“Taking the time, even though the mind boggles at doing these calculations, to arrive at a feasible number gives us that backing,” Warne said. “It is important to build that whole picture and drive home how significant this issue is.”

Within Cambodia, experts say what’s needed is tangible policy and regulation changes, but none seem to have taken place within Cambodia’s farms since the indictment of Vanny Bio Research.

“We will take stricter measures to make sure that all farms comply with the national laws, as well as CITES requirements,” wrote Thuok Nao, the new chairman of the CITES Management Authority in Cambodia, in an email to Southeast Asia Globe.

He wrote that measures would include “inspection of facilities”, as well as making sure that monkeys are “born on the farms” and are not suspected of being wild-caught.

These are all basic enforcement requirements mandated by CITES. If the Forestry Administration considers them to be new measures, it is unclear what it had been doing since Vanny Bio Research was certified to operate in 2004.

While controls may be unchanged, what’s perhaps more worrying is that talk of the indictment, or Cambodia's monkey industry as a whole, has become taboo among wildlife conservationists. 

Representatives from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Wildlife Alliance, Fauna Fauna & Flora International, Conservation International, and WWF-Greater Mekong all declined to comment on the subject, pointing to its political sensitivity. Only WWF-Cambodia managed an oblique statement.

“Wildlife trafficking remains a serious major crime globally,” the office wrote Globe. “Cambodia is a ratified party of CITES. So, illegal trade and trafficking of the species is against the law.”

Without open discussion of the issue, not even within activist and environmental spaces, it’s hard to say what will really change moving forward.

Additional reporting by Sophanna Lay

This article was produced in collaboration with Kontinentalist, with the support of The Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.