This tends to be true for all those engaged at the bottom of a market chain - whether for wildlife, timber or waste - the greatest profits being won by those towards the end of the chain. For example, studies of the illegal timber trade in Nicaragua found that the forest owners and local co-operatives received just 5-10% of the timber’s value, traders and exporters pocketing the rest (Colchester et al., Similarly, in the Papuan province of Indonesia, rural communities involved in the illegal trade of merbau received less than 10 per cent of the export value of this timber, while officials and middlemen made huge profits (Banks et al., This pattern of returns is, of course, also common in legal trade.)