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Selling the tiger to save it: will it work?

Pallavi Aiyar

A proposal to raise tigers in captivity to harvest their body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine has generated a lot of heat. Proponents say it will help curb poaching but conservationists dispute this.

A STORM is sweeping the wildlife conservationist community around the world, with China in the eye. The point of controversy is a proposal that would see the Chinese authorities lifting their 14-year-old ban on the trade in tiger parts. The proposal has both advocates and opponents bristling as they square off in their attempt to persuade the Chinese of either the logic or folly of the idea.

The proposal in essence is to farm large numbers of captive tigers; a certain percentage of them would then be harvested, their parts sold legally. Advocates, mostly free market economists, argue that this legalisation of the market for tiger parts would depress the profitability of poaching and, hence, help protect the remaining tigers in the wild. The free market can protect endangered wildlife by recognising and assigning it an economic value and thus creating the incentives needed to protect it, they reason.

Opponents of the idea, including most international wildlife conservancy groups, counter this assertion, arguing that legalising the trade will only stimulate demand. Commerce and conservation can never be bedfellows, they say.

China currently has some 5,000 tigers in captivity. Over the last decade, the country has spent considerable resources in perfecting breeding techniques for captive tigers. Officials from the State Forestry Administration (SFA) estimate that given a free hand China could breed 100,000 captive tigers over the next 10 to 15 years.

A director with the wildlife conservation department of China's SFA, who did not want to be named, told this correspondent that China would only consider such an extensive breeding programme if it were convinced of the beneficial effects for the protection of tigers in the wild. Until then China would remain agnostic towards the proposal, keeping an open mind while trying to ascertain more facts, the official said.

At present, China has only about 50 tigers in the wild, perhaps even less. However, it is the world's primary consumer of tiger products. Tiger parts such as bones, organs, and blood are vital ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine for which there continues to be considerable demand. It is this demand that has fuelled the rampant poaching of tigers in India and elsewhere.

Any move on China's part to lift its domestic ban on trade in tiger parts will thus have inescapable implications for neighbouring India, which has some 75 per cent of all the wild tigers left in the world. Keeping this in mind, the SFA invited a panel of wildlife experts and economists from India to visit China's tiger breeding centres and provide inputs for the proposed lifting of the ban. The panel spent 10 days in China in late January and early February; they remained polarised in their views.

Barun Mitra, director of the New-Delhi based Liberty Institute, who was part of this panel, has been at the forefront of advocating a market solution. He argues that all the efforts to save the tiger thus far have failed. Despite Project Tiger having been launched in India decades ago there are still only some 3,500 tigers left in the wild in India, even according to official estimates.

The problem lies, according to Mr. Mitra, in conservation efforts having so far focussed exclusively on greater investment in law enforcement. This approach, he is convinced, will never be enough to stopper demand for the product. Banning trade only drives the demand underground, leading to abnormally high profits for the smugglers concerned. Thus, Mr. Mitra claims, the ban on the trade helps the poachers rather than the tigers. He argues instead for recognition of the tiger as a saleable property and a renewable resource. Tigers, Mr. Mitra says, breed easily in captivity and a single farmed animal would fetch up to $40,000 or more and thus pay for its own rearing. Flooding the market with farmed tiger parts would make the risks involved in poaching tigers economically less attractive and thus ultimately help to protect the tigers that remain in the wild. Mr. Mitra is also hopeful that in time techniques to re-introduce captive tigers into the wild may be perfected.

Poaching tigers cheaper

The majority of the other panellists, including the former principal wildlife warden of Madhya Pradesh, the chief scientist of the World Wildlife Fund's India office, and the founders of the Corbett foundation, however, strongly disagreed with Mr. Mitra's conclusions. They were of the opinion that no amount of tiger farming would ever bring down the price of tiger parts to a level that would make poaching unprofitable. Rearing tigers is expensive requiring $3,000-4,000 a year to feed a single animal. A poached tiger, on the other hand, can be acquired for as little as $50.

Poachers would, moreover, have it easier than ever before, given that they would be able to launder wild animals through legal trade channels, the conservationists argued.

Their final objection related to the fact that captive bred tigers have thus far never successfully been reintroduced into the wild. They concluded that were tiger farming allowed, it would only lead to thousands of caged animals in zoos and breeding centres while those in the wild would remain in danger of extinction.

The Chinese government is, in fact, currently supporting a pilot project to reintroduce the South China tiger into the wild. Two pairs of captive-bred South China tigers have been flown to South Africa where they have been released into a controlled "wild" environment. Although one of these tigers has already died, the other three are being monitored. If the project is a success, China hopes to use the same techniques to reintroduce the animals into their natural habitat back in China. A plan that if achieved would also give a fillip to the proposal to farm and harvest tigers.

Mr. Mitra and his supporters, including V. Santhakumar of the Centre for Development Studies in Kerala and A.K. Enamul Haque of Dhaka's Economic Research Group, are advising the Chinese to start moving in the direction of lifting the ban with a controlled experiment. This would involve permitting limited trade from a fixed number of licensed breeding centres to a limited number of manufacturers of traditional Chinese medicine. The resulting medicine would be classified as a prescription drug and would not be available over the counter.

During the period of the experiment, no tigers would be culled to harvest their parts. Use would be made, instead, of the current stockpiles of tiger remains available at China's breeding centres.

"If we succeed we will make history," says Mr. Mitra. "If we fail, at least we would have tried."

Laundering of poached animals through legal channels can be prevented through strict monitoring systems, he says and adds that while a poached animal may prima facie be cheaper than a farmed one, once the risks involved in illegal poaching are added to the calculus, the math may well change. Certified farmed animals would also have their quality guaranteed, a fact that would have value for customers given that at present most of the tiger bone on the market is fake.

There have been instances in the past where farming of animals has helped bring them back from the brink of extinction. Mr. Mitra gives the example of the crocodile. The only difference between the tiger and the crocodile, he says, is that the former engenders a more emotional response. The tiger is after all India's national animal and to many the idea of it being bred for slaughter is unacceptable.

Xu Hongfa, China Director of TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, is unconvinced by Mr. Mitra's arguments. He says enforcement of wildlife laws in China is lax, one of the main reasons that smuggling is so rampant and that this laxity will extend to the tiger farms rendering any system of monitoring ineffective. In the event of the lifting of the ban on trading in tiger parts, laundering of wild animals through legal channels will thus be the more than likely outcome.

Comparing the tiger to the crocodile is also disingenuous, according to Dr. Xu, since the latter are far cheaper to breed than tigers. He agrees with the Indian wildlife experts that farmed tigers will always be more expensive than poached ones, doing little to dampen the profitability of poaching.

What the Chinese government really needs to be focussing on is habitat conservation, Dr. Xu says. He blames the dramatic depletion of China's tigers on an equally dramatic loss of habitat for the animals as a result of deforestation and expansion of large-scale agriculture. Until some of its natural environment is brought back, no amount of breeding will save the wild tiger, he concludes.

Mr. Mitra's proposal has come to be known by the catch phrase, "sell the tiger to save it." His opponents counter that "selling out the tiger won't save it." For the time being China is sitting on the fence between these two warring camps, taking its time to make up its mind. The fate of the tiger may well hang in the balance.

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