Sell the Tiger to Save it?

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 15, 2006

The Liberty Institute’s Barun Mitra has been writing extensively in various journals (The New Statesman, The Far Eastern Economic Review) suggesting that the market in tiger products should be opened up. It seems many policymakers are listening to him. Here is his latest salvo, from the New York Times’ op-ed pages.

One wonders why Mr Mitra finds such a keen reception overseas. One also wonders why the Indian media does not appear to be very interested in this idea, which is a pity because it could well become policy and come upon us abruptly – and if it then turns out that Mr Mitra is wrong it will be too late to do anything about it.

In the interest of joining and balancing the debate, a rejoinder to Mr Mitra is given below his piece.

- Nirmal Ghosh

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Sell the Tiger to Save it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/opinion/15mitra.html
August 15, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor

Sell the Tiger to Save It
By BARUN MITRA
New Delhi

WHICH country is thinking about applying free-market principles to
wildlife preservation and, in the process, improving the survival
chances of a long-endangered species while giving its economy a boost?

Communist China, of course.

China joined the international effort to protect the tiger in 1993.
But today there is a growing recognition among many Chinese officials
that a policy of prohibition and trade restrictions has not benefited
the tiger as much as it has helped poachers and smugglers of tigers
and tiger parts.

Conservationists say the worldwide illegal trade in forest products
and wildlife is between $10 billion and $12 billion, with more than
half of that coming from Asia.

Of the planet's estimated 5,000 wild tigers, about 75 percent are in
India, which, like most nations, believes that commerce and
conservation are incompatible. Only a relative handful of tigers —
probably a few dozen — can be found in China's forests. (The United
States is home to some 10,000 tigers, owned by zoos and private
citizens.) The tiger, in short, is still staring at extinction.

But like forests, animals are renewable resources. If you think of
tigers as products, it becomes clear that demand provides opportunity,
rather than posing a threat. For instance, there are perhaps 1.5
billion head of cattle and buffalo and 2 billion goats and sheep in
the world today. These are among the most exploited of animals, yet
they are not in danger of dying out; there is incentive, in these
instances, for humans to conserve.

So it can be for the tiger. In pragmatic terms, this is an extremely
valuable animal. Given the growing popularity of traditional Chinese
medicines, which make use of everything from tiger claws (to treat
insomnia) to tiger fat (leprosy and rheumatism), and the prices this
kind of harvesting can bring (as much as $20 for claws, and $20,000
for a skin), the tiger can in effect pay for its own survival. A
single farmed specimen might fetch as much as $40,000; the retail
value of all the tiger products might be three to five times that
amount.

Yet for the last 30 or so years, the tiger has been priced at zero,
while millions of dollars have been spent to protect it and prohibit
trade that might in fact help save the species. Despite the growing
environmental bureaucracy and budgets, and despite the proliferation
of conservationists and conferences, the tiger is as close to
extinction as it has been since Project Tiger, a conservation project
backed in part by the World Wildlife Fund, was launched in 1972 and
adopted by the government of India a year later.

If we truly value the tiger, this crisis presents an opportunity to
help it buy its way out of the extinction it now faces. The tiger
breeds easily, even in captivity; zoos in India are constantly told by
the Central Zoo Authority not to breed tigers because they are
expensive to maintain. In China, which has about 4,000 tigers in
captivity, breeding has been perfected. According to senior officials
I met in China, given a free hand, the country could produce 100,000
tigers in the next 10 to 15 years.

(Disclosure: I have been writing on tiger conservation for more than
10 years, and over the course of that time have suggested using the
power of commerce to save the tiger. Earlier this year, I was invited
by the State Forestry Administration of the People's Republic of China
as part of an international group to learn about the Chinese
perspective on the issue; the agency paid for my airfare and
accommodations.)

Wildlife farming and ranching could potentially break the poverty trap
that most forest villagers find themselves in. In Zimbabwe, before the
current spiral into chaos, villagers had property rights on the
wildlife in the forests around them, and they earned revenue by
selling a limited number of hunting licenses. They had a stake.

At present there is no incentive for forest dwellers to protect
tigers, and so poachers, traffickers and unscrupulous traders prevail.
The temptation of high profits, in turn, attracts organized crime;
this is what happens when government regulations subvert the law of
supply and demand.

But tiger-breeding facilities will ensure a supply of wildlife at an
affordable price, and so eliminate the incentive for poachers and,
consequently, the danger for those tigers left in the wild. With
selective breeding and the development of reintroduction techniques,
it might be possible to return the tiger to some of its remaining
natural habitats. And by recognizing the rights of the local villagers
to earn legitimate revenue from wildlife sources, the tiger could
stage a comeback.

Market economics greatly favor the tiger. If China decides to unleash
the tiger's commercial potential, the king of the forest might be more
secure in his kingdom.

Barun Mitra is the director of Liberty Institute, a research
organization that promotes free-market economics.

An open rejoinder to Barun Mitra

Protection, not farming, will save the tiger

By Nirmal Ghosh

INDIA’s tiger debacle has shown that small scattered populations of tigers in fragmented forests can be killed in a matter of weeks if protection machinery is not in place, does not function well, or does not have political backing.

And there has been a fourth factor - local communities generally apathetic towards wildlife conservation, if not downright hostile because they have lost rights to free forest produce.

Asia has already permanently lost three of its original eight species of tigers. The rest, including those in India, are sliding rapidly towards extinction. The first to go will be the south China tiger, of which there are less than two dozen left in the wild.

It has become clear now that India has less than 2,000 tigers left in the wild across the entire country – fewer than the number of people that probably gather at any given weekday lunch hour between the Hindustan Times building on Kasturba Gandhi Marg and the Indian Oil building a block away.

It is by far the biggest population of all Asian countries but in historical terms a small one scattered in disparate groups, many marooned in isolated habitat and prone to inbreeding.

Protection in tiger habitats is often on paper, and corruption endemic not just in India but in many countries where they are found - making them fair game.

A dead tiger can fetch up to US$ 40,000 in China, where the market is growing because of rising affluence. Tiger parts are used for a variety of purposes. Modern research in China itself has found tiger bones are not very different from dog and pig bones, but the appeal of the tiger is not based in reality, it is in the imagination of the consumer.

The global wildlife market, at around US$ 160 billion annually, is estimated to be the third largest in the world after arms and drugs, yet does not attract as much public attention as the first two.

A furious debate is now under way in the conservation community on how to save Asia's remaining wild tigers.

In the process an old idea has been revived - farming tigers to flood the market with their products, thereby driving prices down and reducing the incentive to poach. Revenue could even be used to fund conservation.

The problem is farming of critically endangered species has never saved them from extinction. For example, crocodiles are farmed in Thailand, but there are hardly any crocodiles left in the wild in that country.

Notes professor G. Agoramoorthy, a primatologist teaching at Taiwan's Taipei University : ''I have seen wildlife farms from south America to south east Asia, all somehow directly or indirectly putting pressure on the existing wild populations of endangered species.''

Debbie Banks of the London-based non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency, which has done extensive and definitive work on tigers, notes that traditional Chinese medicine is a global market and the main reason for taking a tiger product is to inherit the animal's properties.

Indeed tiger part substitutes are available in China, but that has done nothing to dampen the demand for tiger products. In fact there is a ‘’problem’’ with fake tiger products making money on this market.

If farm tiger products were to be legalised, instead of currently banned worldwide under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a black market would quickly develop for the wild product.

Opening the floodgates of this market would very quickly kill off the last remaining tigers.

There are just too few tigers around to experiment with such risky strategies. The world is littered with examples (the most glaring of which is poverty) of the failure of ‘’free markets’’ to double as just regulatory and balancing mechanisms. So-called free markets are essentially free-for-alls with those with the most clout – political and monetary – able to subvert the playing field at will.

Opening the floodgates of this market for the tiger, would also fail to address the reasons why we have failed to protect it. Rather than fixing those problems, the solutions for which are known, those in favour of farming believe a new experiment will save the species.

''CITES has explored and rejected tiger farming as a conservation tool on a number of occasions'' says Banks.

Adam Roberts of the US-based Born Free Foundation adds ''China instituted bear farming around 1984 with the argument...that it would reduce pressure on wild populations.''

''The exact opposite is true. Bear farms still deplete wild populations to stock their farms. Bears continue to be poached in the wild, not just Asiatic bears but black bears across north America.''

The economics of poaching undermine the logic of free market balances; it takes around US$ 2,000 a year to raise a tiger to adulthood in captivity in passable conditions, while it takes around US$ 5-10 to have a wild tiger killed. The black market would be hugely more profitable than the farm product market.

Also, the logic that farm bred tigers could be used to restock wild populations is spurious. Farm-bred tigers would likely not be able to survive if introduced into the wild. Though they are adaptable, they are not American bison; they are highly specialised and largely solitary territorial predators who need to hunt, and establish and hold territory, to stay alive.

It is a fact that local communities in countries like India have largely seen wildlife reserves as elitist. Part of the blame lies with conservationists and the tourist industry, who have not been able to make an adequate case out of the fact that wild tigers sustain a huge tourism industry which gives thousands of jobs to locals.

Millions of Dollars have been spent and scores of lives lost in the fight to save the tiger from extinction. Thousands of tourists flock to countries like India only to see tigers. At Thailand's infamous Sri Racha tiger farm, which has been under investigation by the authorities for dodgy tiger deals, thousands of tourists queue up to see bored tigers in cages.

Such is the drawing power of the giant cat. But unless governments seriously crack down on the illegal trade in wildlife, and sharpen protection of tiger habitat, the big cats will, in a tragic and irreversible irony, be hunted and eaten to extinction precisely because of their charisma.

There have been some positive developments in India on this front, and one can only hope they are not too little, too late. The arrest of the notorious Sansar Chand and his associates may have put the brakes on poaching – but only temporarily. Now the government wants to set up a Tiger Conservation Authority and give added powers to the army in border areas, to curb the smuggling of endangered wildlife.

But on-site protection is also critical. Essentially, when a sought-after commodity becomes rarer and its price goes up, the methods of exploiting and extracting it will become more sophisticated and determined. Wildlife poaching and smuggling is run by transnational criminal syndicates. Protection mechanisms need to be sharply enhanced to deal with the threat.

We cannot save our remaining tigers with an on-site protection system which is out of date. We need to fix what we have, not leave the status quo as it is and trying risky new experiments. If we cannot manage the basics, how are we going to manage a new set of problems?

The writer is a Trustee of The Corbett Foundation, former member of the Steering Committee of Project Elephant, and runs the website http://www.indianjungles.com