The Greater Mekong office of TRAFFIC and the German CITES Management Authority co-held a four-day training course on preventing wildlife smuggling for 20 northern Vietnam’s environmental police in Hanoi between Nov. 23-26. The training will focus on the regulations, implementation and enforcement of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and the primary international agreement regulating trade in wildlife and wildlife products. The other training course for police in southern provinces will also be organized in Ho Chi Minh City between Nov. 30 and Dec. 3, the Vietnam News Agency said Wednesday. Both two training courses are sponsored by the German Ministry for Environment and the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BFN). Vietnam detected 1,042 wildlife smuggling cases in the first ten months of this year, statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Forest Protection Department showed.
