The Back Forty

Things are not going well for the world’s dwindling population of tigers, either in the field or in the realm of conservation discourse. The past year has witnessed a surge of debate on tiger conservation, as increasingly discouraging trends are documented and some groups propose controversial remedial measures.

The chronology of this debate is roughly as follows. Last year, India revised its tiger population estimates downwards by about a half- to only about 1,300-1,500 wild animals. The current population of adult breeding tigers in all of Asia may now be as low as 2,500. An article in Bioscience last year on ‘The Fate of Wild Tigers’ estimated that the tiger range may have contracted by 41% over the past decade. Importantly, only about a quarter of the known tiger range lies within the confines of protected areas. The vast majority is outside parks where tigers co-exist with local people.

Wild tigers are declining while debate over conservation stategies intensifies.

In the face of these discouraging trends, controversy erupted over new proposals coming from China to initiate a legal trade in farmed tiger products preceding the 14^th Conference of Parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which was held in The Hague. A major source of tiger population decline has always been poaching for tiger bone, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine and is a highly coveted product. China formally banned the trade in tiger bones in 1993, largely due to international pressure. Since then, though, the country’s domestic tiger population has grown to about 4,000-5,000 animals in captivity.

A combination of Chinese tiger farmers, sustainable use advocates, and pro-trade groups have started calling for a controlled trade in harvested tiger products as a conservation strategy. In August, 2006, Barun Mitra, an Indian libertarian economist, wrote an editorial (‘Sell the Tiger to Save it’) in The New York Times calling for a trade-based approach to tiger conservation. While claiming that a single farmed tiger could be worth up to $40,000 in terms of products like bones and skins, Mitra observed that “for the last 30 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.”

Last year a similar approach was advocated in a publication produced by the IWMC World Conservation Trust, in a report titled, ‘Tiger Conservation: It’s Time to Think Outside the Box.’ The basic thrust of the report is that preservationist approaches based on law enforcement and blanket prohibitions on use to tiger conservation are not succeeding, as they have similarly failed with other species such as rhinos. A collection of authors call for alternative market-based strategies that capture the value of tigers by introducing a sustainable legal trade, or strategies such as limited trophy hunting. The report repeatedly invokes a comparison of current tiger conservation strategies and other ‘prohibitionist’ policies, such as the American alcohol policy of the 1920’s or the ‘war’ on narcotics today.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream tiger conservation community was not pleased with this new advocacy of tiger trade. The Chinese trade proposals spurred a lively and often contentious debate at the June, 2007, CITES conference in The Hague. The Indian delegation provided strong resistance to the idea of trade or utilization of tigers, stating that “Open sale of tiger body parts through farmed specimens is detrimental to the survival of an umbrella species like tiger…we strongly urge Parties to desist from the idea of captive breeding of tigers, and phase out all such programs in the interest of wild tigers.” The debate at CITES saw nearly all countries side with India, and China garner little support, leaving the conference dissatisfied and “stating that they do not intend to change their current national policy and that the decision of the parties is not based on scientific information.”

While the debate on formally sanctioned trade in tiger products appears to be off of the agenda at CITES for now anyway, the overall debate on tiger conservation strategies is likely to continue. Given the deteriorating status of wild tiger populations, despite millions of dollars spent annually by governments and NGO’s on tiger conservation, such a debate seems long overdue.

The latest salvo, published in the first 2008 issue of Conservation Biology, is an article authored by Brian Gratwicke of the Save the Tiger Fund and seven co-authors from major conservation organizations and research institutions. In a brief editorial entitled ‘The World Can’t Have Wild Tigers and Eat Them, Too,’ the article sets out the mainstream conservation position against the tiger trade. The piece notes that the economics of the tiger trade do not appear to have been well thought out, given that raising a domestic tiger costs about $4,000 (mostly in meat supplies), while poaching a tiger can cost as little as $15-$20. The authors argue that the 1993 Chinese trade ban has been “very effective at reducing the supply of tiger bone in China.” They also point out correctly that Chinese tiger farmers have no economic interest in the status of wild tigers, and may have questionable motives.

While this article, like many of the arguments put forth to counter the tiger trade proposals over the past year, is quite successful in poking holes in the Chinese case, it provides no positive vision for reversing the current trends of widespread tiger decline.

The root of the tiger conservation problem, as the pro-trade groups correctly argue, is one of economics. Most tigers live outside state protected areas where they co-exist, generally rather unsuccessfully, with local people. The behavior of these people, like human beings everywhere, is governed by a range of ethical, cultural, and economic incentives. Tigers impose multiple costs on local people, including livestock predation and human fatalities; these costs produce economic disincentives for local communities to tolerate the presence of tigers. It is hard to imagine how tigers can persist when over 75% of tiger range is outside protected areas, but the basic economic incentives at the local level favor eradication of tigers as a costly burden to local people. This situation is hardly unique to tigers- it characterizes human-wildlife conflict throughout the world, and the widespread decline of so many large predatory animals.

Conservation strategies based on sustainable use are clearly one avenue for changing this status quo. Trophy hunting, as has been proposed for tigers, is one effective means of attaching a direct economic value to dangerous species such as elephants and lions, and where it has been decentralized to the landholder or community level in southern Africa hunting has helped drive wildlife recoveries. South Africa and Namibia re-introduced tightly controlled sport hunting of highly endangered black rhinos in 2004, following approval of a small quota at the CITES conference that year. These two countries have well-established, utilization-based conservation strategies that have been very successful at recovering rhinos over the past several decades, and it is likely that limited hunting will help add further economic value to rhinos and thereby contribute to conservation.

Even where hunting is undesirable for practical or ideological grounds- as it apparently is with respect to tigers, in India at least- other options for creating economic incentives exist. A recent article in Conservation Biology describes a highly innovative system of providing ‘performance payments’ for carnivore conservation to communities in Sweden. Where wolverine or lynx successfully reproduce on the lands of Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden, the villages receive payments of about $29,000. Lower payments between $5,000 and $10,000 are made for “occasional occurrence” of these species on community lands.

Closer to the tiger’s home range, the International Snow Leopard Trust has several established programs for reducing the impacts of snow leopard predation on livestock and creating incentives for co-existence of people and these cats. One program pays an Indian community a set annual ‘rental fee’ for establishing a grazing reserve free of livestock, in order to bolster the population of key leopard prey species such as blue sheep.

The resistance of the international tiger conservation community, particularly in India, to tiger trade is understandable, and the China has not exactly established the best record when it comes to conserving tigers or other species (the recent extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin comes to mind). Nevertheless, given the current trajectories of wild tiger populations, this reticence to ‘think outside the box’ and consider market-based strategies is also part of the problem. Even if conservationists and wildlife authorities are committed to prohibiting any legal form of tiger trade or utilization through trophy hunting, alternative strategies for attaching economic incentives to tigers need to be devised. The world may not be able to have wild tiger and eat them too, but it also won’t be able to have wild tigers without making them economically valued at the local level when the majority of tiger range falls outside state protected areas. It is time to think outside the box, but that applies to all sides in this rather polarized debate.