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The
Future Looks Dim For Wild Tigers
A survey by leading conservation
organisations (WCS, WWF/US and Smithsonian National Zoological Park) has shown
that tiger habitats throughout India, Indo-China and South-East Asia are now 40
per cent smaller than they were 10 years ago. Wild tigers in rapidly developing
Asian countries “are in steep decline; today tigers occupy a mere 7 per cent of
their historical range, and the threats are mounting, rather than diminishing”,
the report declares.
And that is not all. There is
pressure in China to restart domestic trade in tiger parts from farms for
medicinal purposes. If the Chinese government, which banned the domestic trade
in 1993, were to permit domestic trade, CITES would not be able to intervene because
it has control only of international trade,. Any proposal to allow
international trade would be unlikely to succeed, as a vote in favour would almost
certainly not get the required support of two-thirds of the 169 Parties
(national government members).
In August, the New York Times
published an article by an Indian economist supporting freeing the trade in
China. He said that legal trade was expected to lessen the pressure on tigers
in the wild. It provoked a strong response in letters from conservation NGOs, which
said that there was every reason to believe that it would encourage poaching,
which is already causing a decline in wild tiger numbers. Only one of the letters
was published by the NYT, but no letters supporting the article appeared;
presumably there were none.
The tiger conservation spotlight has
shone especially on India, whose government has consistently announced census
estimates for 30 years that suggested that the country held over half the
surviving world tiger population. Tiger experts declared that the estimates,
including the 3,642 figure for 2002, were exaggerated. Recent leaked estimates
from the first stage of a three phase official census now in progress have led
to speculation that India’s tiger population could be less that it was (about
1,800) when Project Tiger, the government’s conservation programme, was
launched in 1973. The estimates, from reports by forest guards, have been
dismissed by the Project Tiger authorities, who insist that the following two
stages, including phototraps and digital pugmark measurements, will produce reliable
estimates that they expect to be closer to their previous population numbers.
Completion of the census, originally promised for this autumn, has been put
back to the second half of 2007.
Meanwhile a bill to give ownership
in forest land to an estimated 325,000 tribals living in tiger reserves has
been moving towards discussion and voting in parliament. Not only have limits
in the original draft been removed, but tribal supporters managed to weaken a parallel
bill to give Protect Tiger more power. Conservationists believe that the tribal
bill would be devastating for the tiger because it would lead to forest
destruction.
Most tiger reserves lack a
sufficient number of forest guards, the foot soldiers of conservation, because
of a ban on recruitment for nearly 10 years. Guards now are almost all over 50
years old.
The one positive development is that
parliament has approved the establishment of a National Wildlife Crime Bureau
with wide powers. It was first proposed in 1994 with CITES support, and will
take a year or more to be set up and become active.
The tiger situation in other
countries is dismal, except for the Russian Far East, where team work by
Russian and American specialists has managed to maintain a tiger population of
some 400 for the past 10 years, according to preliminary census estimates. Of
76 Tiger Conservation Landscapes in tiger range, defined as where tigers could
live, Russia has the largest area, 270,000 km2. In other countries
tiger range has “contracted dramatically” according to the survey report.
Does the future mean early
extinction of the wild tiger, while captive tigers proliferate?
The tiger has been famous as the
Flagship of Wildlife Conservation. Its current crisis status reflects that of
most large mammals, and many other species, which are affected by the same
threats – loss of habitat through human population growth, economic
development, and poaching. The world’s wildlife heritage is threatened.
Peter
Jackson
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