Those are all very helpful, but a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says the task force “lacks performance targets, making effectiveness difficult to determine.” GAO recommended the task force establish targets because without them “agencies risk reporting their progress merely as an annual description of successes and accomplishments. While important, these accomplishments alone do not provide accountability because they do not link back to targets, and there is no basis for comparison between actual and intended results.” The agencies agreed with GAO recommendations.

President Obama established the task force with a July 2013 executive order. It directed 17 federal agencies to support anti-poaching activities, including a reduction in consumer demand for products that no one really needs, like souvenirs and trinkets made from elephant tusks. FWS estimated that in 2012 one elephant was killed for its ivory every 15 minutes.

People in the United States are major consumers of the illegal products, as are the wealthy in Asia where the items are considered “luxury goods that enhance social status,” according to Obama’s 2014 “National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking.”

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Poaching is “an international crisis that continues to escalate,” Obama’s executive order declared. “Poaching operations have expanded beyond small-scale, opportunistic actions to coordinated slaughter commissioned by armed and organized criminal syndicates.”

International trade in the illegal merchandise was worth an estimated $7 billion to $23 billion annually in 2013.

“While criminal elements of all kinds, including some terrorist entities and rogue security personnel, engage in poaching and transporting ivory and rhino horn across Africa, transnational organized criminals are the driving force behind wildlife trafficking,” the report said.

To make sure FWS’s protection of elephants and rhinos didn’t go unnoticed, the agency staged its second high profile “ivory crush” in June 2015, this time in New York City’s Times Square. One ton of ivory was crushed to send “a message to ivory traffickers and their customers that the United States will not tolerate this illegal trade.” Three years ago, the first crush in Denver destroyed six tons of elephant ivory seized by FWS agents and inspectors.

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“Elephant poaching is at its highest level in decades and now exceeds the species’ reproductive potential,” according to the FWS law enforcement office. “Elephants are being slaughtered across Africa to meet the demand for ivory faster than they can reproduce.”

Wildlife trafficking has broader, even more sinister implications. “Many of the organized criminal gangs at the center of the trafficking rings are also implicated in the trafficking of drugs, arms, and even people,” FWS said.

This is big business.

“The price of rhino horn had reached approximately $27,000 per pound — which, at that time, was twice the value of gold and platinum and more valuable on the black market than diamonds and cocaine,” GAO reported, citing a 2012 study by the World Wildlife Fund and the Dalberg consulting firm.

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Since 2007, the recorded number of poached rhinos has exploded, jumping about 92 times, from 13 to approximately 1,200 in both 2014 and 2015.

Congress is getting into the fight with last week’s final approval of the Eliminate, Neutralize, and Disrupt (END) Wildlife Trafficking Act of 2016, sponsored by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif). The legislation supports increased assistance to local officials fighting poachers “who are often armed with night-vision goggles, heavy weaponry, and even helicopters,” according to Royce’s office.

Terrorists also get involved in wildlife trafficking, but to what extent is not clear.

In February, William R. Brownfield, an assistant secretary of state, told a congressional hearing that the Somalia based al-Shabab terrorist organization and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which began in Northern Uganda, engage in wildlife trafficking.

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Al-Shabab acts as a tax collector, tapping the trafficking organizations as they move product through areas, particularly ports and border crossings, the terrorists control.

“And they do make a substantial amount of money,” Brownfield said.

GAO, however, reported that other officials say the link between wildlife trafficking and terrorist organizations is inconclusive.

Whomever is involved, the “trade is decimating iconic animal populations,” Obama wrote in the strategy. “Today, because of the actions of poachers, species like elephants and rhinoceroses face the risk of significant decline or even extinction. But it does not have to be that way.”