International Affairs: Did you know that the world is missing 551 Picassos, 43 Van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts, and 209 Renoirs? Just one of the more trivial examples of illegal trade documented in this slightly breathless and tract-like book.
Many other examples are provided, most of them much more alarming - as they are intended to be. Everywhere the author looks, there is evidence of a large and growing business in illicit trafficking. The multiplication of examples is deliberate; the clues, he says, are in the stories. But the stories are too diverse for a fully coherent analysis to emerge. One moment we are given a detailed account of the personalities and companies involved in the "atomic supermarket" masterminded by the celebrated Pakistani nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, supplying secrets and equipment to Libya and North Korea. But soon we are being told about the Taiping Four, who turn out to be lowland gorillas who were poached in Cameroon in 2001 and smuggled out to a zoo in Malaysia.
For Moisés Naím, a former government minister in Venezuela and editor of American periodical Foreign Policy, the diversity of such transactions masks a more sinister underlying commonality. Whether involving arms, drugs, humans, ideas (software piracy), or money (laundering), they are all part of the global trafficking networks now threatening the very fabric of society.
The relentless catalogue of stories has its effect. Shortly after reading Illicit, I happened to be sitting in an airport lounge in a small oil-producing country also known for hosting the activities of arms dealers. As I awaited my boarding call, I watched long, thin boxes being unloaded from an old Russian-built cargo aircraft. Suddenly it all made sense . . . or did it?
Reviewing the main methods that are adopted to limit illicit trade, Naím does make a reasonably convincing case that technology may have favoured the smuggler more than the coastguard in the past few decades. He cites underfunded government agencies not only mired in bureaucratic wrangling and poor coordination, but also trying to comply with obsolete laws, hampered in particular by their inability to cross national frontiers as easily as the smugglers. NGOs can score successes: raising awareness and cutting across borders to achieve targeted results, but as a group they do not have the coherence, the scale or persistence needed to win the war.
The author sees the growth of trafficking as a side-effect of globalisation and worldwide policy changes. Traffickers can hide their cargos in the millions of containers that are on the high seas every day; they can exploit electronic communications technology to ensure that deliveries are arranged and paid for in a covert manner; the removal of policy barriers to commerce opens the door to the trafficker (though at the same time reducing the incentive to trafficking which those barriers had previously helped create).
International business, legal or illegal, has always tended to be at the forefront of technology. For good or ill, merchants have always brought exotic goods from where they were cheap to where they were dear. In doing so, they often had little regard to the question of legality. But Naím rejects any suggestion that such things have been always with us; his view is that "everything" has changed. I'm not so sure. Besides, illegality has not been a reliable touchstone of social damage. After all, the most reprehensible exchanges - such as the African slave trade or the opium trade to Chinese coastal ports - were for years not deemed illegal by European powers. And some traffic that is illegal shouldn't be: let me take the safe example of importing books by Steinbeck, John McGahern or Kate O'Brien into Ireland until the 1970s; avoiding (as the author also does) the trickier issue of patent laws, which at present dramatically increase the cost in desperately poor countries of badly needed drugs.
IN THE LAST chapter, the author suddenly (and without notice) changes tack, effectively abandoning the premise that illicit trade is the defining characteristic of a seamless evil phenomenon, and that a holistic approach to its suppression is needed. Instead, he meekly suggests that the only feasible policy approach requires distinguishing between the bad and the not so bad. In particular he calls for decriminalisation of the less harmful trades, to allow law enforcement to focus on those that really threaten global well being.
This seems eminently sensible, but leaves the reader wondering why the rest of the book had lumped together all forms of illegal trade in such an indiscriminate manner. Why did the author choose to gloss over the enormous moral differences between, for example, traffickers who trick, abduct and enslave would-be migrants, and youngsters who illegally share music tracks over peer-to-peer internet connections?
Globalisation has increased the speed and scale of international linkages, legal and illegal. Clearly, as Naím emphasises, reducing the success of the traffickers calls for the best technology and well- designed organisational structures (helping to ensure, for example, information-sharing across police forces). But we should also examine the deeper sources of some of the most troubling of the illicit trade. How can we, for example, reduce the desperation that creates victims for latter-day slavers? Accelerating economic development in the poor countries may be the most effective way of undermining the conditions that encourage and shelter the most damaging forms of trafficking.
• Patrick Honohan is co-editor of Systemic Financial Crises, recently published by Cambridge University Press
• Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy By Moisés Naím William Heinemann, 320pp. £12.99