Poaching and illegal trade of bears, driven largely by the demand for bile, used in traditional medicine and folk remedies continues unabated across Asia on a large scale, a report by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, has found.

This report presents an assessment of the trade in gibbons and orang-utans in Sumatra, Indonesia, including the islands off Sumatra’s west coast (most notably, the Mentawai Islands). Until recently Sumatra and its off-lying islands harboured one of the largest expanses of lowland evergreen rainforest in Southeast Asia.