Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the Answer of 27 June 2016 to Question 40644 on animal products: imports, what assessment his Department has made of whether improvements have been made to the way hunting takes place; which countries have made such improvements; and what criteria have been used to monitor whether improvements have been made by those countries.

We take conservation of endangered species seriously: imports are subject to strict controls under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Imports of hunting trophies of lions and certain other species require both a CITES export permit from the country of origin and an import permit issued by the country of import.

The UK will only issue an import permit if it is satisfied that the trophy has been legally acquired. The UK’s CITES Scientific Authority also makes a sustainability assessment, taking into consideration the views of the EU CITES Scientific Review Group (SRG), to confirm that the trade will not be detrimental to the conservation of the species concerned. Imports of hunting trophies of animals, such as African elephants and lions, from various countries have been assessed regularly at meetings of the SRG, most recently at its meeting in November 2017, where the decision to refuse imports of lion hunting trophies from Mozambique, (except from the Niassa reserve), was taken. Other countries from which imports of lion hunting trophies are no longer permitted include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Somalia.

In 2016, the then Minister for the Environment, Rory Stewart commissioned a study on lion conservation with respect to the issue of trophy hunting. Defra is currently looking carefully at trophy hunting imports to ensure that they do not impact on the sustainability of endangered species.