The United Nations’ biodiversity chief Elizabeth Maruma Mrema has called for a global ban on wildlife markets as one such marketplace in China’s Wuhan city is believed to be the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian reported. She said such a ban would prevent future pandemics.
China has temporarily banned wildlife markets where animals are kept alive in small cages for sale, often in poor conditions where they could incubate diseases. Many scientists have urged Beijing to make the ban permanent.
Citing examples of the Ebola outbreak in west-central Africa and the Nipah virus epidemic in east Asia in recent years, Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, said there were clear links between the destruction of nature and new human illnesses.
“The message we are getting is if we don’t take care of nature, it will take care of us,” she told the newspaper. “It would be good to ban the live animal markets as China has done and some countries. But we should also remember you have communities, particularly from low-income rural areas, particularly in Africa, which are dependent on wild animals to sustain the livelihoods of millions of people.”
Mrema said that countries had to find alternatives for these poor communities, or there might be a danger of opening up of illegal trade of wild animals, “which is already leading us to the brink of extinction for some species”. “We need to look at how we balance that and really close the hole of illegal trade in the future,” she added.
The number of Covid-19 positive cases worldwide has crossed 12.88 lakh, and more than 70,000 patients with the disease have died, according to a tracker by Johns Hopkins University.
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