Wildlife trafficking as a societal supply chain risk: Removing the parasite without damaging the host?

Abstract

Humanity's intrusion into nature—with the objective of selling animals and plants as medicine, food, and tourist attractions—is detrimental not only to biodiversity and the health of ecosystems but also to local communities, global society, and human health. Often, traffickers exploit legal supply chains to secretly move endangered species and protected wildlife to end consumers. Serendipitous discoveries of wildlife trafficking attempts raise concerns that existing efforts to prevent wildlife trafficking and other criminal exploitation of legal supply chains brought about by international laws, regulations, and voluntary initiatives may often fail. Indeed, most supply chains are designed for economic purposes such as efficiency or responsiveness rather than security. Scholarship in supply chain management has thus far dedicated scarce attention to the overarching phenomenon of illegal exploitation of otherwise legal supply chains, referred to as “supply chain infiltration.” Because we were unable to speak with perpetrators directly, we obtained insights from expert stakeholders in order to study the delicate and covert topic of what makes supply chains vulnerable to wildlife trafficking, as well as how this vulnerability can be mitigated. Our data set comprises 37 semi‐structured interviews with knowledgeable stakeholders concerning wildlife trafficking, specifically in maritime supply chains. This research develops a model that explains supply‐chain‐related vulnerabilities to wildlife trafficking and elaborates regarding how respective actors can contribute in addressing this understudied issue. We introduce the concept of “societal supply chain risk” to refer to hazards that emanate from or materialize within supply chains, which primarily affect actors in the supply chain context—and possibly even humanity in its entirety. Our research calls for more supply chain research, exploring situations in which individual firms may not be affected but can contribute to the solution.

In search of operational resilience: How and when improvisation matters

“…Adopting a COR theory perspective, we see firms as having an innate desire to be resilient: to survive and thrive (Altay & Pal, 2023; Duensing et al, 2023; Hobfoll et al, 2018). Our reasoning is in keeping with information processing theory and the resource dependence logic in the supply chain literature that suggests that firms seek to minimize uncertainty, strive for stability and continuity, and accordingly, deploy bridging and buffering strategies to achieve resilience (Bode et al, 2011; Jiang et al, 2023; Manhart et al, 2020; Wong et al, 2020).…”

Breaking bad: how can supply chain management better address illegal supply chains?

“…The supply chain literature considers “illegal” supply chains and a non-exhaustive list of related terms such as sanctioned, counterfeited (Handfield and Nair, 2019), misconduct (Skilton and Bernardes, 2022), criminality (Smith and McElwee, 2021), corruption (Carter, 2000), fraud (DuHadway et al. , 2022), infiltration (Duensing et al. 2023), exploitation (Kougkoulos et al.…”

“…The supply chain literature considers "illegal" supply chains and a non-exhaustive list of related terms such as sanctioned, counterfeited (Handfield and Nair, 2019), misconduct (Skilton and Bernardes, 2022), criminality (Smith and McElwee, 2021), corruption (Carter, 2000), fraud (DuHadway et al, 2022), infiltration (Duensing et al 2023), exploitation (Kougkoulos et al, 2021) and interdiction (Bell et al, 2015), although some of these may not be actually be illegal depending on the location of the activity. Skilton and Bernardes (2022) discuss how institutionalised these issues can become and conceptualise this as "normal misconduct'.…”

“…DuHadway et al (2022) draw our attention to questions of agency "through omission or commission" where one or more actors harm other actors (p. 125). Illegality can infiltrate (Bhagwati, 1981;Duensing et al, 2023) at any, or multiple points, in the supply chain and impact all aspects from the packaging and credentials to product replication (Handfield Illegal supply chains and Nair, 2019) as well as fully counterfeited where all aspects are replicated, even authentication tags (Economist, 2022a). Illegality encompasses the violation of national laws or international obligations.…”

“…More importantly, innovations in supply chain management, such as containerisation and e-commerce, have greatly enabled illegal activities. Containerisation enables multiple forms of illegal activity with (port) inspectors often unable or unwilling to keep up with the high volumes (Duensing et al ., 2023; Fears, 2014; TRAFFIC, 2020). Similarly, blockchain and cryptocurrencies facilitate illegal transactions by removing intermediaries and facilitating illegal activities directly between people (Collins, 2022; Economist, 2022a).…”