To secure protected areas from wildlife trafficking, criminal networks must be dismantled (commentary)

Conservation has historically emphasized protected area management including protecting land, fencing, local enforcement and rangers’ patrols within parks. And indeed, decades of protected area management have demonstrated that strong local protection matters enormously.

But there is a weakness in this logic that we rarely confront directly.

Protected areas can suppress poaching within their boundaries and in neighboring patrolled zones, but they cannot dismantle the criminal networks that finance, organize and replenish wildlife crime from the outside, which impact inside the protected areas as well as landscapes more broadly. As long as those networks remain intact, they will keep recruiting poachers, corrupting officials and — when conditions change (i.e. increased ivory prices, corruption in ranger units, etc.) — resuming operations.

Focusing conservation investment exclusively on protected area protection, while ignoring the organized crime infrastructure surrounding it, is a little like trying to stop drug use in a neighborhood without ever addressing the criminal organizations supplying it. The pressure does not disappear. It persists and finds new ways.

The threat that lives outside the fence

Wildlife trafficking is not a disorganized or opportunistic activity. It is a structured criminal enterprise, operating with hierarchy, logistics and, critically, access to high-level corruption within the institutions meant to stop it.

When analyzing across more than 3,000 prosecuted cases in Africa undertaken by our team at EAGLE Network, a clear pattern emerges: Trafficking networks do not merely exploit weak enforcement — they actively engineer it. These networks embed themselves within wildlife authorities, security forces and government ministries, using corruption to move contraband, suppress arrests and obtain advance warning of patrols. Corruption, in this context, blinds us twice: First by circumventing protection efforts without our knowledge, and then by ensuring that wildlife losses go unrecorded and information gets suppressed.

This is not abstract. The evidence is concrete and deeply troubling.

The syndicate at the center

Consider the Teng Syndicate — one of the most significant ivory trafficking operations ever dismantled in Central Africa, and a case that illustrates precisely the scale of threat that conventional protected area management cannot address alone.

The syndicate was headed by three Asian nationals and employed hundreds of poachers across multiple African countries. Operating with strict hierarchy and military-style coordination from a private house in a wealthy residential quarter of Yaoundé, Cameroon, the Teng network centralized and exported roughly 600 elephant tusks — approximately $5 million worth of contraband — every two months.

Their ivory trafficking history traced back to the 1980s, with operations previously run in Nigeria before relocating. We estimate the Teng Syndicate was responsible for the killing of around 36,000 elephants across Central and Eastern Africa over three decades.

No amount of ranger training or patrol investment inside any individual protected area could have stopped this. The poachers the syndicate employed were replaceable foot soldiers. Arresting them one by one, while leaving the criminal architecture intact, would have changed very little. So, the rational strategy is not to focus on foot soldiers while neglecting the mafia that sends and activates them.

Corruption reaches the top

The Teng case is striking in scale, but the pattern of high-level institutional compromise it represents is not exceptional — it is disturbingly common.

Take the illegal trade in African grey parrots, a species now classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List. One criminal pyramid behind this trade — estimated to have generated half a million dollars every week at its peak — was found to have the secretary general of the Cameroon Ministry responsible for wildlife at its apex. He was removed from his post only after his role was exposed through anti-trafficking enforcement. Guinea’s wildlife director was put behind bars following similar investigations.

These are not isolated incidents. Around Africa, many senior government officials, including wildlife directors have been found to play active, central roles in the illegal wildlife trade — and not just as passive recipients of bribes — but as operational participants. This reality fundamentally changes what effective conservation must mean in practice.

Anti-trafficking as conservation infrastructure

The implication is uncomfortable but inescapable: Anti-trafficking enforcement is not a parallel agenda to protected area landscape conservation. It is a structural prerequisite.

When trafficking networks remain active and corruption goes unchallenged, conservation investment becomes less cost-effective with every passing year. The networks adapt, develop new supply chains, recruit new middlemen and find new gaps in enforcement. Anti-trafficking programs that treat arrests not as an endpoint but as an entry point offer something conventional protected area conservation cannot: Operational, national and regional scale intelligence.

By systematically mining the phones and computers of arrested traffickers — recovering emails, chats and forward-looking plans — investigators can understand not just how criminal systems currently operate, but how they intend to evolve. This kind of intelligence generates an early-warning system that can alert protected area managers to emerging threats before they materialize on the ground.

The relationship between poaching and trafficking — between threats inside a landscape and threats organized from beyond its borders — needs to be understood as a single problem, addressed at multiple scales simultaneously. A national and regional anti-trafficking capacity is not a luxury add-on to conservation programming. It is the outer layer of protection that makes inner-layer efforts sustainable.

A different kind of conservation investment

The conservation sector has made enormous strides in protected area management, community engagement, and habitat restoration. These investments matter and must continue. But the donor community has been slower to mobilize resources toward direct intervention to address the organized criminal dimension of the threat — perhaps because it requires working at a different scale, engaging different institutions, and confronting uncomfortable truths about corruption in the highest offices.

No matter how much money goes into a protected area, or how skilled or committed the management team is, corruption and organized crime networks can and will erode that investment from the outside, quietly and systematically.

Protected area landscape protection and anti-trafficking enforcement must be understood as complementary pillars of the same conservation goal, not separate programs with separate resource allocations and a separate logic.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in dismantling trafficking networks. Given what we now know about their reach and capacity, the question is whether we can afford not to.

Ofir Drori is founding director of The EAGLE Network.

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