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HOMEIS IT ALL ABOUT THE MONEY? 1. There is NO consensus that farming crocodilians (crocodiles and alligators) per se helps protect the species in the wild; claiming there is one is deliberately misleading and totally ignores critical nuances relevant to individual species. 2. Reptiles are easy to introduce into the wild. Tigers are not. 3. Tigers are vastly more expensive to raise in captivity than crocodilians. 4. Even if trade is reopened, killing a tiger in the wild will still be much cheaper and hugely profitable for poachers. With the cost of raising a tiger in a farm to harvestable age and size upwards of US$ 4,000/- and the cost of killing one illegally in India (or anywhere else) less than US$ 2/- there is no hope of meaningfully closing the profit gap. 5. Legalising trade in tiger parts will re-ignite and expand demand - which is the aim of ANY business. Ignoring this reality is to deny the fundamental rules and realities of marketing. 6. It is completely unrealistic to expect the Chinese authorities to be able to implement and enforce a watertight monitoring system for farmed tiger products. This is not to denigrate China, which has often prosecuted poachers of endangered species. It is a problem in ANY country. Even the USA with a sophisticated, high-tech and resource-rich system, cannot prevent thousands of Mexicans from crossing its border to work in the USA, every week. 7. Scientific tests in China itself, have shown that tiger bones have no more medical value than bones of dogs, pigs and goats. 8. A large body of China’s own traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, has publicly stated that they are not interested in prescribing tiger bones and parts for patients. So why open the trade now? 9. China’s tiger farmers continued to breed tigers long after the 1993 ban on trade in tiger parts. Why should the government rescue them now for making a bad business decision? Additional information and more details are available in the paper Tiger Trade Facts and Fallacies available on the Web at: http://assets.panda.org/downloads/tiger_facts___fallacies_final.pdf OPEN LETTER TO BARUN MITRA, DIRECTOR OF THE LIBERTY INSTITUTE, NEW DELHI August 3, 2007 Dear Barun, Thank you for sending me two of your recent articles (in the Far Eastern Economic Review and China Daily) to me for comments. My apologies for the delay in replying. I will be frank in this email. As I review what you have written over recent months, I cannot help but point out that there is a difference between a true independent and visionary thinker, and a lobbyist. When I first came across your reasoning in favour of China legalizing the trade in tiger parts, despite the clearly ideological position of where you come from (the Liberty Institute, and more recently apparently also associated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute) - and despite the fact that I disagreed with your reasoning - I admired the fact that you challenged the status quo and came up with new ideas and were not afraid to air them. But your increasingly dogged position, in which you simply ignore arguments that are inconvenient for your point of view, repeat your own arguments and are clearly selective in your research and choice of citations, can only mean one of two things : 1) That you are not as bright as I thought you were; 2) That you are just another lobbyist willing to discard objectivity, logic and independence in favour of shaping dogma defined by, in this case, China’s tiger farmers and their allies in government. Since I do believe you are bright, the answer can only be ‘2’. It would explain why you pose arguments that are so easily questioned and/or proven wrong or at the very least highly debatable either in fact or premise, on such a sustained basis. I do not think such an approach is good for your credibility! If, on the other hand, you acknowledge in public that you are a lobbyist, you would ironically have more credibility. I will make the following points: 1. The fact of the matter is opening up the tiger trade is all about money for a few people, and NOT about saving tigers. In this regard, the SFA in China is actually more transparent than you are; increasingly they do not bother to camouflage their intent with the argument that opening up the trade will be the key to saving tigers in the wild, and they have acknowledged the influence of the tiger farmers. 2. Corruption in government circles in China is also well known; read the international press and you will be better informed. You cannot simply ignore such a relevant factor. 3. Your crocodile farming analogy is overly simplistic, leaving out key nuances and details - and falls flat on simple economics, or when it meets the example of the Siamese crocodile, or indeed China’s own alligator. Simply ignoring examples of the failure of your market economics approach, does not help your cause. If you were better informed, less selective in your research and choice of expert opinion, and more open-minded, you would know that there is still much debate in the crocodile/alligator conservation and farming community, on whether farming helps protect endangered crocs/gators. Even the IUCN data you cited in the blurb for your talk in Washington DC on July 27 (this and your trip to The Hague for the CITES COP were funded by whom by the way? I feel we need more disclosure, frankly) itself revealed, on face value, around a 30% failure rate of the hypothesis that breeding crocodilians saves the endangered wild variety. Is that the best you can offer - a ‘’solution’’ to saving the tiger which has a 30% failure rate? You also totally ignore a fact so fundamental that it makes one again question either your research or your motivation or both : . reptiles, unlike tigers, can be released in the wild without too much difficulty, for they do not require complex parental training. 4. Nobody in his right mind introduces a product into a market in a ‘limited’ manner unless they want to make even more money from unmet demand. It is Marketing 101 that introducing a product stimulates demand, and businesses exist because they want to grow. 5. You simply ignore traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners - and there are many - who have publicly stated that they are not interested in prescribing tiger products to their clientele. You also simply ignore the results of scientific tests in China itself, known since 1997 when they were revealed at the first international conference of TCM practitioners and conservationists in Hong Kong, that show that tiger bone is not substantially different from the bones of dogs, pigs and goats, and in fact is remarkably similar to the bones of the high-altitude ground-burrowing mole rat, the sailonggu. Sailonggu wine is already available; why do people not buy it in large quantities? In that lies yet another flaw in your argument : buyers go for tiger products because of the image and charisma of the tiger, not because of its medical properties. As such, any consumer would greatly prefer a wild tiger to a farmed tiger anyway; a black market would develop very rapidly. 6. Even on the economics, your arguments are flawed. Cigarettes and booze are legal in the UK, but because of favourable price differentials of a few cents per unit they are still smuggled in from other countries (look it up). Rice and gasoline is traded across the border between Thailand and Malaysia for this same reason. Everywhere in the world, examples abound of this. The slightest price differential will be exploited, spurring this kind of illegal activity (in this case tiger poaching, on which data and information are readily available). These points have been raised with you before, and you have either ignored them completely or not adequately addressed them. Being a lobbyist would mean, of course, that you will continue to do so - which would be a great pity. If on the other hand you are truly independent, then as a thinker/scientist of integrity and honesty would do, you would acknowledge these realities. There is nothing dishonourable in floating an idea or theory, subjecting it to peer review, and if it is found wanting, discard it. It serves to destroy taboos and open new doors, thus broadening and deepening the discourse. Once done, the thinker/scientist’s formidable intellect can then be turned to other ways of addressing the issue. In the interest of transparency, I will be releasing this message to a wider public and placing it online as well - along with your articles in FEER and China Daily. I am sure you will agree that this is too important an issue to be discussed only in select circles. Regards from Bangkok, Nirmal |
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