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.” Read the rest of this entry »

As ecosystems all over the world hurtle towards large-scale transformation as a result of increasingly interconnected local and global forces, it is more and more apparent that bold new conservation strategies are required. In a paper published last year, Daniel Nepstad and three co-authors provide a synthesis of the set of economic and ecological trends which suggest that 55% of the Amazon will be deforested by 2030. This paper indicates the scale and the complexity of tropical forest conservation challenges, but also identifies some promising trends and strategies for addressing the problem.

One set of trends revolves around ongoing changes in global commodity markets. Higher oil prices and the search for alternative fuels is leading to surging demand for biofuels and ethanol. This growing demand influences the Amazon in multiple ways. Higher ethanol prices have led to an expansion in the area of land used for corn in the United States, thereby displacing soya production. Increasing demand for bio-diesel is also leading to increased production of sugarcane in southern Brazil, which also displaces soya production to agricultural frontiers to the north, in the Amazon region. All of this leads to increased demand for land for soya farming, which is further driven by the increasing affluence of countries like China and their growing demand for meat, since soya is a leading source of livestock feed. Expanding soya production generally does not directly lead to deforestation, but displaces more marginal cattle production, pushing ranches further into forested areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Namibia is an African country that tends to avoid the headlines. Less than twenty years old after gaining independence from apartheid South Africa only in 1990, and with less than two million people, it is a generally peaceful and, by African standards, a wealthy nation. Taking its name from the Great Namib Desert, the country is the driest south of the Sahara, and land use is dominated by cattle and sheep ranching, with mining providing a major source of foreign exchange as it does in neighboring Botswana. The most attention received by Namibia in recent years occurred when Hollywood couplet and aspiring humanitarians, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, decided to give birth to their first child there, and holed up in the coastal city of Swakopmund for several months.Namibia, though, has achieved something extraordinary in the realm of wildlife conservation, establishing one of the most successful track records in Africa, if not the world. Moreover, Namibia’s success is based on an iconoclastic approach which runs counter to much conventional wisdom about how to conserve wildlife and endangered species.

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