Kafil Yamin, Jakarta – The market is dirty, is chaotic and reeks of animals. Called the Pramuka pet market, its bazaar-like atmosphere, punctuated by the calls of creatures in distress, camouflage well the fact that this untidy sprawl in the eastern part of Indonesia's capital is a key part of a multimillion-dollar smuggling operation.
About 30 kilometers away and, like Pramuka, within the municipal confines of Jakarta is Barito, another pet market. This too has a profusion of birdcages swinging overhead, while hutches containing monkeys, dogs and cats line the narrow walkways.
Most visitors to Pramuka and Barito are bona fide – including local bird lovers in search of bird feed.
What few know is that both markets have a global reputation, though a very dubious one indeed, one they got a glimpse of when the Indonesian police struck twice in January to prevent rare and protected animals from being smuggled out.
On January 20, Japanese national Ohashi Masayuki was stopped at Jakarta's Sukarno-Hatta International Airport.
Among the 85 animals he was attempting to smuggle out were rare gibbons and endangered squirrels. Just two days later, three Kuwaitis were thwarted in their bid to spirit away rare and protected Indonesian wildlife.
The alarming scale of the smuggling was revealed by a vendor in the Pramuka market, who said he sells an average of 150 rare wild animals every month. "My regular customers are from Japan, the Middle East and Malaysia," he said. "If we make a deal – which includes a guarantee for delivery – then I send the animals to the airport."
The vendor says the animals come from the forests of Sumatra, East and West Nusatenggara, Papua and Kalimantan provinces. He then spoke of an arrangement that resembles a supply chain: "When we get an order and agree with the prices, then we contact our regular suppliers and tell them what we need."
That chain extends from markets such as Pramuka and Barito outward across the far-flung archipelago. It thrives with impunity despite Indonesia being a party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) from l978.
The criminal practice continues to flourish because of a lack of law enforcement and because of the huge price that rare species command from international buyers. Like narcotics, the "street value" of smuggled endangered species is far higher than what the vendors pay – a rare cockatoo sold in Indonesia for Rp3 million (US$260) can fetch up to $2,600 abroad.
The vendor claimed there is "no difficulty" in passing through the customs and airport security. "We just give them some money and they take care of our things," he explained, adding that payoffs are reserved for at least three institutions in the airports: customs, the airport pet quarantine bureau, and forestry officials.
Another pet vendor in the Barito market said that when deals are agreed upon, "agents" in destination countries stand ready to secure the delivery. "I have been working with a Malaysian company to do this business for two years," he said, claiming that there are international airlines willing to carry such prohibited cargo.
With the stakes spiking up to about a million US dollars a day – the estimate of one customs official of the international value of animals smuggled out of Indonesia in a 24-hour period – the suppliers and vendors control a market that is more lucrative than illegal logging.
In fact, the director general for forest protection and natural conservation, I Made Sumadia Gelgel, said: "It is estimated the losses [from animal smuggling] are much higher than losses caused by log smuggling."
This translates into an enormous sum. The Forestry Ministry reckons that every year, illegal logging costs Indonesia Rp30 trillion ($3.4 billion), and that this activity annually destroys 1.6 million hectares of forest.
Compared with the profits to be had from smuggling, the legal trade in animal species – those species not covered by the CITES can be traded legally – is relatively minuscule. Live reptiles, birds, corals, reptile skins, butterflies, and wild orchids earned Indonesia an average of $20 million per year in the last three years.
The country is the largest exporter of birds in Asia – and is, more surprisingly, the biggest importer in Asia. Among the world's bird-exporting countries it ranks fourth after Senegal, Tanzania, and Argentina.
But contesting the official lament about the plundering of Indonesia's natural wealth is Iwan Setiawan, staff member of the Indonesian Environment Information Center (PILI). In September, he led a team to research the trafficking in endangered species in the Pramuka and Barito pet markets.
He said he found some protected animals on sale and evidence of transactions, and reported his findings to the ministries of Forestry and Environment, the Nature Conservation Body and the police. The result? Nothing, said Iwan, which has led him to conclude that there is a nexus between the smugglers of endangered species and the authorities.
It is a view that is repeated by the Gibbon Foundation, a conservation group based in Jakarta. A member of the group's office explained that the foundation had at one time entered into a cooperation agreement with the Forestry Ministry to map wild-animal populations using satellite imagery. The aim was to identify the remaining concentrations of wild species.
"But this invaluable information was leaked out," said the staffer. "Then we found traces of professional hunters in the regions and the animals had gone."