Not for Sale
Researchers take on illegal wildlife trafficking through supply chains
There’s big money to be made in the illegal wildlife trade—an estimated $23 billion a year—making it a difficult problem to stop. The figure comes from the World Economic Forum.
Illicit wildlife trafficking—primarily originating in Africa—is recognized globally as a threat to endangered species, habitats and people. So two MSU faculty members recently formed a team aimed at finding a new approach to disrupt the trade.
“Wildlife trafficking is less understood than drug, small arms or human trafficking, but the illicit networks often share a number of the same supply chain characteristics,” said Stanley Griffis, the John H. McConnell Professor of Business Administration and project co-lead. MSU conservationist Meredith Gore, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife, is the project’s other co-lead. For the past two years, she’s been on the ground in the Democratic Republic of The Congo and the Republic of the Congo, building relationships with local communities and agencies, gathering data, mapping trade routes and learning how goods—illegal and legal—move along their respective supply chains.
Findings are expected to yield a new understanding of how illegal goods are moved and shipped throughout the African continent and across the world.
“It’s a terrible business, but at the end of the day, traffickers are managing a supply chain in ways that are not unlike how legitimate supply chains are managed,” Griffis said.
“The team will take what we learn from Gore and local partners, then apply theories and knowledge of supply chains to walk the problem backward to understand similarities and differences in wildlife trafficking,” he said in a recent MSU interview.
The National Science Foundation is supporting the project. Operations engineers and computer scientists from the universities of Southern California, Alabama, Colorado State and Harvard fill out the research team.
Contributing Writer(s): Caroline Brooks
