The international body that polices the wildlife trade says it still can't rule out fraud in Cambodia's export of long-tailed macaques, the monkeys most often used in drug safety testing. An assessment by the CITES Secretariat, dated October 5, 2026, found that Cambodia has made limited progress on reforms it was asked to make a year ago. The Secretariat said it "cannot confirm or rule out the occurrence of fraud or corruption" in the trade. The CITES Standing Committee meets in Geneva from November 2 to 6 and is due to discuss it. For now, exports continue.

What happened

Long-tailed macaques, also called crab-eating macaques, are listed on CITES Appendix II. That means they can be traded across borders, but only with permits showing the trade is legal and won't harm wild populations. Cambodia exports them as captive-bred animals from breeding farms.

The question for years has been whether some of those "captive-bred" monkeys were caught in the wild. In 2022, US prosecutors charged eight people, including Cambodian officials, over an alleged scheme to pass off wild monkeys as farm-bred and ship them to the United States. Cambodia rejected the charges in 2023, Radio Free Asia reported.

In February 2025, the CITES Secretariat recommended suspending the trade. The Standing Committee didn't follow that advice. Japan asked for the decision to be deferred, and the United States, Canada and Kuwait backed the request, according to the industry group NABR. STAT reported that the deferral came after a request from the Trump administration. Instead, Cambodia was told to open its farms to inspection, hand over logbooks and explain birth-rate figures that experts considered unrealistically high, Mongabay reported. According to PETA, CITES inspected the main breeding farms in June 2025 and set out required reforms that November.

What the new assessment says

The October 5 assessment is the follow-up. According to PETA, which published a summary and a letter about it on October 9, the Secretariat found that:

  • Monkeys living freely around temples, towns and parks were still being taken to breeding farms, with exporters arguing they weren't "wild." CITES rejected that view, PETA says, stating that "a free-living monkey is wild."
  • Metal ID tags that a US investigation found had been moved from dead monkeys onto wild-caught ones still hadn't been destroyed.
  • Breeding records were incomplete and didn't add up. US investigators found that five of six farms reported more births than the species can biologically produce, and only one farm gave a detailed explanation.

Travelbinger, summarizing Mongabay's reporting and the CITES document, reports the same overall conclusion: governance at the farms is still not good enough. We couldn't open the CITES document ourselves for this report, so these points are attributed to the outlets that described it.

Why it matters for animals

This is about two groups of monkeys. One is the wild population in Cambodia, where any trapping to stock farms takes animals straight out of parks, temple grounds and towns. The other is the monkeys that end up in laboratories. If the paperwork can't show where an animal came from, nobody down the line can be sure it was bred legally.

There's a disease angle, too. PETA points to cases of Cambodian-origin monkeys carrying Burkholderia pseudomallei, a bacterium the US lists as a Tier 1 select agent.

What each side says

PETA wrote to US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on October 9 asking him to stop imports of Cambodian monkeys for US labs. It also backs the PRIMATE Act, a bipartisan bill that would ban importing monkeys for laboratory use.

The research industry sees it differently. When CITES published its earlier findings in November 2025, the National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) said the report showed Cambodia complying with international rules and praised its customs checks and cooperation. NABR says long-tailed macaques are the most commonly studied primate in drug safety work and that a shortage puts US medical research at risk.

Cambodia's government has previously disputed the birth-rate concerns, objected to the use of US investigation data and said it welcomed inspections, according to Mongabay. We didn't find a public response from Cambodia to the October assessment.

What happens next

The Standing Committee's 81st meeting runs from November 2 to 6 at the Geneva International Conference Centre. The CITES Secretariat has announced a press briefing on it in Geneva. Options open to the committee, according to Travelbinger, include stricter trade measures or a suspension of trade in the species from Cambodia. It could also defer again, as it did in 2025.

What you can do

  • CITES decisions are made by governments. Each country has a CITES Management Authority, listed on cites.org, and you can write to yours or to your elected representatives before November 2 and ask what position they'll take.
  • In the US, you can contact your members of Congress about the PRIMATE Act.
  • Follow the meeting's outcome from the CITES Secretariat directly; we'll report the decision.

Sources