Global Anti-Poaching Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. 459, H.R. 2494.
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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I know of no further debate on this measure.

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I am going to take a few minutes, if I might, to celebrate something that we, frankly, have a chance to celebrate far too rarely--a bipartisan legislative success.

I am thrilled to be here to celebrate the passage of the End Wildlife Trafficking Act, a bill Senator Flake and I have been working on for months since it was introduced in December of last year, an idea which we have been working on for well over a year. This bill has been a long time in coming.

I first saw the tragic consequences of poaching and wildlife trafficking decades ago when I was a young man in Kenya, and I first visited Africa with a number of my colleagues on a trip to look at the dramatic increase in wildlife trafficking just a few short years ago.

President Obama issued an Executive order to combat wildlife trafficking back in 2013, and Senator Cardin and I held a joint hearing on the topic in 2014 when I chaired the African Affairs Subcommittee. Senator Flake, now the chair of the African Affairs Subcommittee, and I introduced this bill together last December, and now we are excited to see it pass this body and be one step closer to becoming law.

Why is this bill important? Why does wildlife trafficking in Africa matter? Because nearly 100 elephants are killed every single day so their ivory tusks can be sold on the black market. Ivory now commands prices higher than heroin or gold, and it has become one of the principal ways of financing transnational networks of terrorists and of criminals.

The tragic consequences for the African elephant were recently noted in a report that showed that the population of elephants across the continent shrank by one-third in the last decade. In 2014, more than 1,000 rhinoceroses were illegally killed in South Africa, a several thousand-percent increase since the decade before. And as rhino horn and elephant tusks command outrageous prices on the world market, the demand has driven both wildlife poaching and trafficking steadily upward. Until today, it has become a multibillion-dollar industry that threatens wildlife, fragile ecosystems, and our national security.

Wildlife poaching and trafficking is one of those problems about which it is tempting to throw up our hands and ask: What could we possibly do about this? It happens on the other side of the world and it affects wildlife most of us will never see in person. But we didn't. And because of that, because of our persistence and determination and because so many people on the committee staff in the Senate and in the executive branch have devoted time and effort to coming up with a strategy and a pathway toward addressing it, we have lots of reasons today to be optimistic.

In President Obama, we have a President engaged in the continent of Africa and committed to combating trafficking and poaching. In Secretary Kerry, we have a former Senator who, when he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, dedicated personal time and effort to highlighting the issue of wildlife trafficking. As I mentioned, in 2013, the President created a task force on wildlife trafficking that produced a national strategy for working together to combat wildlife trafficking. Now, just today, we have a strong bill--the End Wildlife Trafficking Act--that has passed the Senate and is on its way to the House.

Based on a recent conversation, I am optimistic that Chairman Royce and Ranking Member Engel, of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, will move this forward in the week ahead. Both Chairman Royce and Ranking Member Engel deserve great credit for passing a complementary bill in the House, and it is because they have already acted on this that I am optimistic we will be able to together reach our end goal.

What exactly does that bill do? Let me briefly say, it requires a strategy, it authorizes an interagency approach to working with the governments of many countries affected by wildlife trafficking, and it produces recommendations on how to address those threats in coordination with nongovernmental organizations. It authorizes the Secretary of State and the Administrator of USAID to support efforts to combat poaching and wildlife trafficking and to encourage community conservation programs--an initiative, a direction, that Senator Flake and I have seen in person on the ground in southern Africa.

It also includes strategic regular reviews to monitor progress being made, and it gives prosecutors more tools to go after individuals involved in high-value wildlife crime. Last, but not least, it encourages diplomatic efforts around the world to try and reduce the demand for wildlife trafficking and for the markets that consume so much of this illicit traffic, whether in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, or elsewhere. Finally, it requires an annual report back to us in Congress to let us know how any taxpayer dollars appropriated in this fight against wildlife trafficking are being spent.

This bill isn't just good policy. In a Congress that is all too often paralyzed by division and by dysfunction, the passage of this act is an important example of what it can look like when we put good policy before partisan politics.

I want to briefly thank the staff of Senators Corker and Cardin; my own staff, including Lisa Jones, who spent a great deal of time on this; the staff of Senator Flake, Colleen Donnelly and Sarah Towles; and three terrific people, all of them AAAS fellows who have helped bring this bill to passage: Rosa Mutiso, Allie Schwier, and Leah Rubin Shen, who has moved from being an AAAS fellow to my office and has done a terrific job getting us to the finish line today.

I am so grateful for all of the work of the dedicated folks in Congress and in the executive branch who have made this possible.

Thank you very much.

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