Poachers thriving on Chinese support

The new patrons of illegal trade in tiger and leopard body parts from India are Chinese military officials, a London-based NGO has found.

Updated on: Oct 23, 2009, 24:52:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The new patrons of illegal trade in tiger and leopard body parts from India are Chinese military officials, a London-based NGO has found.

“Wildlife traders told us that Chinese military officials were buying tiger and leopard skins for putting them up in their homes or for official purposes,” said Debbie Banks of Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which visited China in August 2009 to investigate the illegal trade.

This year alone, 75 tiger deaths have been reported in India, the maximum since 2001, according to NGO Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). “Tiger poaching cases reported this year (2009) are also the maximum in the last three years,” said Belinda Wright, executive director of WPSI, which partnered in the investigation.

The EIA photographed tiger and leopard skin and body parts in Lhasa and in Xining, Linxia, Shigatse and Nagchu provinces, but their visibility in markets had gone down since 2004, when the first such probe was held.

Investigators spotted 27 tiger, leopard and snow leopard skins in these markets. Many of them — all from India — were less than a year old.

In Lhasa, investigators found that Tibetans shunned tiger skins after a call by Dalai Lama, but Banks said, “Most of the business has gone underground, with rich Han Chinese from Beijing and Shanghai ordering tiger skins as decorative items.”

A huge jump in prices of tiger body parts in the last couple of years had made the business highly lucrative.

A full tiger skin in China costs between $11,660 and $21,860 (Rs 541,000-Rs 1 million), while a leopard skin fetches $1,020-$2,770 (Rs 47,000- Rs 129,000).

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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