As the world’s booming black market for body parts from endangered species continues to elude effective policing, rhinoceros deaths quadrupled in four years to the 1,215 killed by African smugglers in 2014. These magnificent animals were slaughtered so that urbanites in places like China and Vietnam can take a dose of powdered rhino horn, which fetches tens of thousands of dollars a pound as a luxury cure for hangovers.

A growing buyers’ market is driving the destruction, according to overwhelmed American government inspectors charged with tracking the illicit trade in rhino horn, elephant ivory and other prized animal parts. The smuggling of totoaba fish bladders (selling for up to $20,000 each) by the hundreds of pounds from Mexican waters, leaving the fish near extinction, is one of the newer depredations that feed a demand in Asian markets that is eagerly met by criminals in the United States and elsewhere.

The illegal wildlife market was negligible 30 years ago, when the Fish and Wildlife Service had about 300 inspectors on watch, but it has mushroomed into a $20-billion-a-year industry that is attracting criminal gangs versed in global trading in drugs, guns and prostitution. Yet against this criminal bonanza the wildlife service has had to make do with roughly the same number of inspectors. They are tasked with tracking what is now an enormous smuggled inventory passing through New York, Los Angeles and many other ports. Criminals enjoy an estimated 90 percent chance of going undiscovered and unprosecuted.

The Obama administration underlined the problem last week in promising a new campaign to use American intelligence agencies and other resources to combat well organized and armed global gangs — and to press for greater cooperation from the African and Asian nations that provide the supply and the demand.