China wildlife scheme endanger Indian tigers

There has been a sudden jump in online sale of tiger and leopard skins since China reopened the trade for registered wildlife body parts in 2007.

Updated on: Aug 12, 2011, 22:12:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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There has been a sudden jump in online sale of tiger and leopard skins since China reopened the trade for registered wildlife body parts in 2007.

A tiger skin rug was offered for sale for US $ 124,000 and a stuffed tiger for US $ 700,000 in 2010. In addition, sale of leopard skins ranged between US $ 100,000 to US $ 300,000. China has not officially declared how many skins have been traded.

Details become public before a United Nations sponsored global meeting on wildlife trade starting from Monday in Geneva causing an alarm in India. “It is an issue of concern for us as most of the tigers and leopards are found here,” said a senior environment ministry official.

India as per latest tiger census has 1,706 big cats. Although there is no official estimation of leopard population, there number range between 5,000 to 10,000. In 2010, 180 leopards were killed in India, as per data available with NGO Wildlife Protection Society of India.

China first allowed registration of tiger and leopard body-parts under its registration scheme from authorised sources and now has allowed its trade. The Scheme allows for tiger and leopard skins from ‘legal origins’, including those from captive-bred big cats, to be registered, labelled and sold.

“This provides perfect cover for illegal skins to be laundered and seriously undermines China’s promise to ban the trade,” said Debbie Banks, who heads the tiger campaign at UK based Environment Investigation Agency (EIA).

The EIA fear was confirmed when it found that several tiger and leopard skins were being traded online and origin of most of these skins was said to be China, which has just 50 tigers in wild and 5,000 in tiger farms. “We sought information from China but there was no response. We fear that big cat skins being offered may be coming from India,” Banks said. Till the scheme was launched there was negligible online sale of tiger and leopard skins.

Environment ministry officials, however, did not rule out this possibility but said poaching in India has reduced because of increased vigilance but still illegal wildlife trade through north-eastern India was rampant.

The ministry with NGOs from UK and US will raise the issue at the meeting of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Standing Committee in Geneva, a UN body mandated to regulate wildlife trade.

The weeklong meeting starts on Monday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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