According to Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus:
It is not surprising that the passage from pangolins to humans occurred in China both in the case of the Novel Coronavirus and that of SARS, which started in Foshan municipality in Guangdong Province, for China is the global center of the wildlife trade, much of it illegal. As food systems expert Mahendra Lama points out, China hosts "scores of both licensed and illegal commercial breeding centers supply tigers, porcupines, pangolins, bears, snakes and rats." A study by the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated that, in 2016, there were more than 14 million people working in the wildlife-related industry that fetched $74 billion.
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