Illegal wildlife markets could be consigned to the dustbins of history within five years amid a public outcry over their capacity to spread disease, and a widespread belief that the trade at least contributed to the coronavirus pandemic.It’s a sentiment that has been backed by a survey by the World Wildlife Fund and strategic consultants GlobeScan, covering five key markets in East Asia, where consumption from illegal wildlife markets remains prevalent.Matt Hunt, chief executive officer at Save the Bears in Cambodia, said massive change would occur in how people live as a result of the pandemic and said such surveys should back government efforts to shut down illegal wildlife markets.“All it takes is the political will,” he said, adding that such markets could be consigned to history within three to five years if politicians were prepared to act.FILE – A man looks at caged civet cats in a wildlife market in Guangzhou, capital of south China’s Guangdong Province, China, Jan. 5, 2004.“These are centuries-old habits, so change isn’t going to come overnight, but I think for sure we could be looking at a four- to five-year target or even a three-year target to really try and knock the illegal wildlife trade on the head,” he said.Researchers surveyed 5,000 people in Hong Kong, Japan, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, and about 90 percent were “very likely” or “likely” to support government efforts in shutting illegal and unregulated markets trading in wildlife.Marcus Hardtke, a Cambodia-based environmentalist, said that would go a long way toward protecting endangered species that are hunted in the wild.“The snares, they hunt with snares mostly, and they just grab everything, endangered, not endangered, and most of the animals die in these snares before they are even found so they are really death traps and it’s a total complete waste.“Without the market that would to a large extent stop. There would still be subsistence hunting but it’s still the market that drives the greater demand,” he said.Almost 80 percent of respondents believed closing illegal and unregulated wildlife markets would be “very or somewhat effective” in preventing future pandemics.It also found that 9 percent knew someone who had purchased wildlife products in the last 12 months and that 38 percent believed wild animals were the primary cause behind the coronavirus. Sixty-three percent believe illegal wildlife is one of the top two causes of the pandemic.Topping the list were birds, followed by snakes, bats, civet cats, pangolins and turtles.“Chinese researchers have suggested the virus might have come through the traditional Chinese medicine of using bat feces for eye ointment,” David Olsen, conservation director for WWF, said in regard to the coronavirus.He also said illegal wildlife markets could be closed swiftly.FILE – Customers visit a wet market to buy food in Singapore on April 4, 2020, with some people wearing facemasks due to concerns over the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.“People throughout the region are genuinely concerned about pandemics, and they do understand the link between the wildlife trade and the emergence, the spillover, transmission of infectious disease, also that they support governments taking action against high-risk situations.“Pandemics can emerge from the wildlife trade, and if we want to continue engage in selling high-risk wildlife in high-risk situations, we’re just putting ourselves at risk again.”In Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong, about half the respondents said the spread of human disease headed their concerns, with pollution and climate change third and fourth — although the economy was also a prominent concern in Hong Kong, given the current protests.The spread of human disease was an equal concern alongside climate change at 26 percent each in Japan, followed by terrorism. But in Myanmar, the use of wild animals and plants was the greatest worry, COVID-19 was second and climate change third.Support for illegal wildlife markets was almost nonexistent. Just 2 percent of respondents said they were not worried at all about these markets.However, people surveyed were divided on trust issues. Less than 45 percent trusted governments to follow through on what they regard as a very important issue. Fewer still trusted fellow citizens when it came to dealing with the outbreak of diseases such as COVID-19.Hardtke added that markets would eventually close because traders in illegal wildlife were also facing supply shortages with too many forests now bereft of wildlife.“Ultimately it has to happen because the resource is just no longer there and if you look at the hunting pressure in the protected areas of the forests in the region, it’s just crazy,” he said.“They call it the empty forest syndrome because there’s simply nothing left anymore. You can walk around for a long time and you don’t hear or see anything.”  
  
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The novel coronavirus has led to a diverse array of crises for Thailand. Paramount are the nation’s healthcare and economy. But the pandemic has also impacted Thailand politics, with Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha delaying a necessary cabinet reshuffle and extending a state of emergency.Analysts say the postponed reshuffle has placed the government in political limbo. The military, which came to power in a 2014 putsch, governs Thailand with a coalition of parties. One of them, the Palang Pracharath Party, saw 18 members resign last week after a schism over how Thailand is responding to Covid-19. The resignations force an election within the party, which in turn could change which party members are part of the executive cabinet.Despite the political uncertainty, Prayuth, a military general, has a tighter grip on power. He has extended an emergency decree until June 30, which the state has invoked to arrest protesters, harass journalists and whistleblowers reporting unfavorable information, and intimidate health workers who complain of shortages of much need medical supplies. The government says the measures are necessary to fight the virus.Thailand Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha answers questions during an open session at the parliament house in Bangkok, May 27, 2020.“The emergency decree provides Thai authorities unchecked powers to suppress fundamental freedoms with zero accountability,” Brad Adams, the Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.The tighter control follows a pattern around the world. Central governments have used the virus as a reason to acquire emergency powers, from the troops deployed in Chile’s streets, to the city cameras that Russia has tapped to surveil citizens.Problems multiply In addition to its political crisis, Bangkok is having to address other problems as well, including a record drought, and an economic slowdown. Tensions came to a head this week, when lawmakers walked out of a committee meeting to discuss the billions of dollars Thailand will spend on the Covid-19 recovery. Disagreement over spending and other virus responses was also behind the mass resignations of party members last week.Members of parliament wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus stand an open session at the parliament house n Bangkok, Thailand, May 27, 2020.Scholars Rawin Leelapatana and Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang argue that the problems have been simmering. Earlier this year, they said, Thais were already angry that the state had cracked down on opposition party members.“Dissatisfaction soon grew into other topics such as Prayuth’s failure to rescue the country’s sinking economy and to clean the government of corruption,” Rawin and Khemthong wrote in Verfassungsblog, an academic forum.Covid-19 was a useful distraction, they said, writing, “The pandemic, therefore, offers Prayuth much-needed cover and respite.”Thailand was the first nation outside China to report a case of the virus. So far, the virus has killed 58 people and infected 3,125 in the southeast Asian nation. The virus has hurt overlooked populations in particular, such as prison inmates and undocumented migrants, activists say.Doctors and ICU nurses wearing personal protection equipment (PPE) perform a CT scan for a COVID-19 patient at the King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, April 23, 2020.The United Nations Children’s Fund said it is reaching out to migrants and others in the Thailand to provide medical aid, emergency grants, information on hygiene practices and mental health support.“Migrants and other vulnerable groups were already facing a number of challenges even before the pandemic because of their status, language barriers, social stigma and discrimination,” said Thomas Davin, the UNICEF representative in Thailand. He added, “It is our collective responsibility to support the most vulnerable, regardless of their legal or ethnic status, and ensure that they are safe and have access to services to survive and stay healthy.” 
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The death of George Floyd and the subsequent anti-racism protests sweeping the U.S. are being latched onto by African and ethnic minorities elsewhere — from Iraq to Britain, from Canada to Australia — to boost awareness of their own struggles to overcome endemic racial prejudice.The death of Floyd, an African American man who died in police custody after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, has prompted large “Black Lives Matter” protests in dozens of countries around the world, many of them ignoring coronavirus social distancing rules.Some rights activists say Floyd’s death might one day be compared in terms of its wider impact to the 2010 self-immolation of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, a street-hawker who doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his goods by police.FILE – Then-Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki places flowers Dec.17, 2012, at the tombstone of Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, who set himself alight on Dec. 17, 2010.His death was a catalyst for the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests and rebellions that hit much of the Arab world in the early 2010s.Both cases unleashed “tremendous popular energy,” according to Juan Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan. In Tunisia’s case, “a small drama unfolded that would change the world, and certainly would change Tunisia,” he wrote in a recent commentary.Speaking Tuesday at Floyd’s funeral in Houston, his brother, Rodney, sought to comfort mourners, saying “everybody is going to remember him around the world. He is going to change the world.”Boost for own campaignsAnd as the impact of Floyd’s death in Minneapolis cascades around the world, rights activists and ethnic minority campaigners say they’re drawing inspiration from the mostly peaceful protests in the U.S., which are breathing new life into their own demands for racial justice.In many cases protesters outside America have been focusing their ire as much on police brutality or racial discrimination in their own countries as on Floyd’s death, warning their own leaders not to see racial prejudice as exclusively an American problem and inviting them to look at their own records of minority deaths in custody.In Australia, thousands marched last week in solidarity with their counterparts in the U.S., but highlighted mostly the deaths of indigenous people in police custody in Australian police stations and prisons — by one count, 434 have died since 1991, including a 40-year-old Aboriginal man in a prison outside Perth in western Australia as the marches kicked off.FILE – Protesters march in Sydney, June 6, 2020, to support U.S. protests over the death of George Floyd. Thousands of demonstrators in state capitals honored Floyd and protested the deaths of indigenous Australians in custody.Many of Australia’s protesters chanted, “Justice today, for David Dungay,” a 26-year-old Aboriginal man who, like Floyd, said, “I can’t breathe,” as he died in 2015 while being restrained by prison guards. Some banners at a rally in Australia read: “Same story, different soil.” Aboriginal people remain the most incarcerated in the world by percentage of population — while making up just 3 percent of the nation’s population, they account for 30 percent of those currently held in Australia’s prisons.One demonstrator in Sydney, Leon Saunders, 77, told the BBC: “The raw deal Aborigines have been getting in this country for my lifetime and many lifetimes before — that is just not right. We can look at America and say what terrible things are happening over there, but right here on our home soil, there are just as bad things happening and they need to be improved.”Mexico, IraqIn Mexico City, demonstrators demanded justice for a construction worker, Giovanni Lopez, who was allegedly beaten to death in police custody last month. In Iraq, activists hope to raise awareness about the rights of more than 400,000 African Iraqis and are trying to trigger a public debate about their lack of political representation in government. Many African Iraqis can trace their origins to the Abbasid caliphate after the year 750 when thousands were transported from East Africa as slaves.In the British port city of Bristol, the statue of a 17th-century slave trader was toppled and dumped in the harbor. Britain has also had its share of black men dying in police custody — 13 since 2010. The names of those 13 were written on many placards held up at rallies in London.Following protests in Britain — there were more than 200 last week attended by an estimated 137,500 people — Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday acknowledged the “cold reality” that black and other ethnic minority groups face discrimination in education, employment and criminal law.Speaking on Britain’s Sky News, Marcia Rigg — whose brother, Sean Rigg, died after being arrested in 2008 — said, “I welcome the protests, but where have the protesters been all these years in the U.K.? They’ve never supported us enough, and I would like that support again from the U.K.  … We need to clean up our own backyard.”An independent review in 2017 of deaths and serious incidents in police custody found that where use of force or restraint was applied by British police, black and minority individuals were twice as likely to die as their white counterparts.A statue of Belgium’s King Leopold II is smeared with red paint and graffiti in Brussels, June 10, 2020. In the wake of George Floyd’s death King Leopold II is now increasingly seen as a stain on the nation.In Belgium as in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the Floyd protests have forced a racist past to be confronted, prompting demands for continuing racial prejudice to be tackled. Statues memorializing colonial figures have been targeted in Belgium, including one of King Leopold II.Primrose Ntumba, an assistant in the parliament in Brussels, told broadcasters that Floyd’s death had given momentum to efforts to get the country to acknowledge Belgium’s colonial history. “We have a lot of history that a lot of people don’t know about and it really impacts people of color and particularly black people in Belgium,” she said.“A lot of the white majority citizens in Belgium do not understand why black people are so angry, because they have never been taught about it,” Ntumba said.She and other rights activists said events in the U.S. serve as a mirror that can be turned around for an examination of racial prejudice in their countries.Western foesThe governments of some — especially U.S. and Western foes — have used the Floyd’s death to claim their own race relations are more equitable. State-controlled media in China, Iran and Russia have all given extensive coverage to the U.S. and Western protests, focusing on the small-scale violence that unfolded in a handful of U.S. cities and some European towns, notably London and Hamburg, but largely overlooking the overwhelming peacefulness of most demonstrations, say observers.And leaders in Moscow, Tehran and Beijing have seized on the tumult as an opportunity to accuse the U.S. and West of operating under double standards. Chinese officials have been comparing the U.S. unrest to the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, where Beijing is poised to limit political freedoms.The U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, has rejected the accusations of hypocrisy. She said Friday: “There’s no moral equivalence between our free society, which works through tough problems like racism, and other societies, which do not allow anything to be discussed because they are authoritative regimes.” She cited the forcible detention in “re-education camps” of more than a million Uighurs in western China.
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