A One Health Approach to Wildlife Trade and Policy in Viet Nam
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic, which is widely recognized as originating in a market selling live wildlife in China, has caused the deaths of millions of people and major impacts on livelihoods, society, and economies across the world. Conditions increasing risk for emergence of zoonoses from wildlife are not unique to China. They are prevalent in wild animal value chains across the globe, including in Viet Nam, where wildlife is commonly traded for meat, pets, skins, traditional medicine, and for display in private collections. Disease surveillance along wildlife trade chains in Viet Nam has increased awareness of potential public health risks, but much trade continues and the risk of zoonoses' emergence and transmission remains. An increasing body of scientific data supports multi-sectoral coordination and an evidence-based approach to strengthening policy on illegal wildlife trade (IWT) in Viet Nam to address the risk of zoonotic spillover, with resulting co-benefits for biodiversity and human health.
Clasificaciones
Region
Scale of implementation
Ecosystem
Theme
Species Conservation and One Health Interventions
One Health
Challenges
Sustainable development goals
Aichi targets
Marco de Sendai
Business engagement approach
(I)NDC Submission
Challenges
This solution addresses challenges to biodiversity conservation and increased risk of disease spillover posed by conditions along the wildlife trade chain. Wildlife supply chains involve conditions that present a high risk for the emergence, amplification, and transmission of zoonotic pathogens which can lead to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. Live and freshly killed mammals and birds are of particular concern, being main hosts of emerging viral zoonoses, and more prone to shed pathogens when highly stressed. Emergence and amplification risks are greatest in urban and peri-urban markets, where crowding of live wildlife and fresh meat from different species, close to larger numbers of people and other animals, provides ideal conditions for recombination, sharing, and shedding of pathogens and transmission to humans. Few urban consumers depend on wild meat for dietary needs or food security, mainly purchasing or consuming wild meat as a luxury.
Beneficiaries
Science-based approaches support sound policy choices, benefitting threatened wildlife and the global human population through biodiversity conservation and lowered risk of economic and health crises from spillover of zoonoses.
¿ Cómo interactúan los building blocks en la solución?
Developing collaborative, cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary, multi-agency One Health frameworks is essential to build effective wildlife surveillance networks as well as to share information and develop trust and understanding of emerging health risks from wildlife in order to implement evidence-based policy change.
Galería interactiva
Impacts
Viet Nam banned importation of wildlife in January 2020, in response to COVID-19, and called for heightened enforcement of existing laws on IWT in the Vietnamese Prime Minister’s Directive No. 29 on “urgent solutions to manage wildlife”. In 2020, government representatives, multi-laterals (FAO, WHO, UNEP), NGOs and multiple embassies collaborated through a Pandemic Prevention Task Force and met with the Prime Minister, aiming to reduce risks of pandemic emergence from wildlife trade in Viet Nam by phasing out the commercial trade of wild birds and mammals. Subsequently, a technical working group on “wildlife and pandemics” was established under a three-Ministry One Health partnership platform, the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), Ministry of Health (MOH) and Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), and a Master Plan for the One Health Partnership Framework for Zoonoses, 2021-2025 was established and signed by WCS, and 30 national and international partners. The Government of Viet Nam has since revised a number of decrees addressing animal health, public health, food safety, and wildlife management with the aim of mitigating the risks and impacts of future pandemics, including Decree 14 (2021) regulating penalties for offenses involving animal husbandry, and Decree 07 (2022) increasing sanctions for violating wildlife trade laws and regulations.
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