Farmed or Poached? The trade of live Indonesian bird species in the Philippines

By Emerson Y. Sy, Josef Job G. Raymundo, Serene C.L. Chng

A new TRAFFIC study recorded more than 800 Indonesian birds¹ for sale online in the Philippines between January 2018 and December 2019. Since the survey, all 20 of the original groups have been deactivated by Facebook, but surveillance by the authors in January 2022 found 144 new active groups offering various Indonesian species for sale, which continues to date. Almost 1,300 Indonesian birds of at least 28 species were also confiscated from illegal trade in the Philippines between 2010 and 2020, according to the report Farmed or Poached? The trade of live Indonesian Bird Species in the Philippines. Scrutiny of international trade records uncovered discrepancies: a majority of the Indonesian bird species listed on CITES² exported from the Philippines had questionable or no records of legal import into the Philippines. The records show that the Philippines had severely underreported their imports of Indonesian bird species compared to the numbers reported by exporters. In some cases, the export of Indonesian birds from the Philippines took place before the first reported legal importation.

Selangor, Malaysia , TRAFFIC Southeast Asia Regional Office, 2022. 55p.