Browse - Most popular shows featuring: global trade^x

From the illegal weapons to the underground sex trade, nothing is off limits and everything is for sale in illegal, underground markets. It's an industry that is brutal, exploitative, and corrupt where what you buy isn't always what it seems. Despite efforts to crack down on these illegal trades, more than $625 billion makes it's way into the US economy each year for illegal trade goods. Unprecedented inside access brings light to the inner workings of the last bastion of "free" enterprise, charting a global path to the underworld economy. Workers, suppliers, sellers, customers - and the law enforcement trying to keep it in check - share their experience of a hidden world that touches us all.

$34 million worth of cars must be shipped across the Atlantic; nuclear parts needing to be shipped present a unique set of problems.

Manufacturing supply chains create a vital distribution web that links producers and consumers across the planet, but as a result of the COVID pandemic, these critical shipping connections now face catastrophic disruptions sparking a global crisis.

Sex. Drugs. Exotic animals. Human organs. With the right amount of money, they're all there for the taking-and much closer than you'd want to think. Crossing the globe from Asia to Africa, to the Americas and Europe, our host, Nelufar Hedayat, goes under the radar and just out of sight to track down these thriving black marketplaces. What Nelufar finds is a world of profit-driven dealers, compliant middlemen, bribe-taking officials, poachers and smugglers who operate vast transportation networks, packaging factories, safe houses...all the while moving enormous amounts of money. The numbers surrounding the world's underground markets tell a story equal parts horror and human. In the last 40 years, 95% of the world's rhino population has been lost. Counterfeit pharmaceuticals have captured $200 billion on the black market. And perhaps most alarming, human trafficking has reached dizzying highs-or perhaps more appropriately, staggering lows-as a $32 billion global industry. Plain and simple, if there's a demand for it, it can-and will-be trafficked. In each of the eight, one-hour episodes Nelufar traces the supply chain of one good from consumer to source and finds that the illegal world is often closer to the legitimate one that you might think. She explores the causes and effects of trafficking: species hunted to near extinction; miners forced to pay protection money to terrorists; people forced by poverty to sell their organs. Travelling by plane, taxi, boat and rickshaw, Nelufar makes her way through bustling markets, down dingy alleyways and into more than a few dead ends, as we witness every step of her investigation. In the world The Traffickers shows us, we'll find more questions than answers-and perhaps see that things are not as black and white as they first might seem.