With just 500 left, the tiger is heading for extinction in Indonesia
Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 17 Feb 08;
BANGKOK - NOT very far from Singapore in increasingly quiet jungles, a sad and lonely drama is being played out.
At the rate Sumatran tigers are being killed, skinned and butchered and sold part by body part, after the south China tiger, it is probably the most likely to disappear from the face of the Earth.
Seemingly inexorable, Asia is losing its tigers.
Refined census techniques show a sharp drop in the number of tigers left in the wild in India.
The south China tiger is probably functionally extinct - meaning that, in a genetic dead-end, the population is too small and scattered to breed.
Last week, from Jakarta to New Delhi, officials and conservation organisations have been struggling to catch up with the escalating crisis.
Indonesia has already lost two races of the tiger - the Javan and Balinese. Now, it is in the process of losing the last - the Sumatran.
In Sumatra, there are now only 400 to 500 tigers left.
'It doesn't take a mathematician to work out that the Sumatran tiger will disappear like the Javan and Bali tigers if the poaching and trade continues,' said Ms Julia Ng, programme officer with TRAFFIC South-east Asia, which monitors trade in illegal wildlife.
Habitat conversion - in short, the destruction of once-pristine forests to make way for highways, plantations, towns and industry - is the overall driver of the tiger's extinction across Asia. But what is proving the final straw is the direct removal of individual animals by poachers supplying the Chinese and other Far Eastern markets with tiger products.
A TRAFFIC report on trade in Sumatra released last Wednesday - co-authored by Ms Julia Ng - states:
'Tiger body parts, including canine teeth, claws, skin pieces, whiskers and bones, were on sale in 10 per cent of 326 retail outlets surveyed during 2006 in 28 cities and towns across Sumatra. Outlets included goldsmiths, souvenir and traditional Chinese medicine shops, and shops selling antique and precious stones.'
Based on the number of canines seen, the survey conservatively estimated that the products offered accounted for 23 tigers killed.
While this was down from an estimate of 52 killed in a previous study over 1999-2000, that is more a reflection of the difficulty of finding the increasingly rare tigers than to a decline in demand, Ms Ng said.
TRAFFIC's surveys have for several years pin-pointed Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, and the smaller adjacent town of Pancur Batu, as the main hubs for the trade of tiger parts.
But 'despite TRAFFIC providing the authorities with details of traders involved, apart from awareness-raising activities, it is not clear whether any serious enforcement action has been taken'', the report states.
'We have to deal with the trade,' admits Dr Tonny Soehartono, director for Biodiversity Conservation in Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry, in a press release issued with the report.
'Currently we are facing many other crucial problems which, unfortunately, are causing the decline of Sumatran tiger populations.' He cited land-use changes and habitat fragmentation, which often drive tigers closer to humans, and poverty, as problems which lead to human-tiger conflict.
Such conflict is the core of the problem.
Many scholars of human society and ecology have pointed out that from around the time of the Industrial Revolution, man has increasingly seen himself and his destiny as outside nature and controlling it, rather than of nature and part of it.
And nature is only valued in the short-term sense of its use for humans.
Tigers in particular have suffered from two mutually reinforcing factors: ignorance and fear. Thus they have more often than not been killed off by people when they have the means to destroy them.
But the ethical argument is only part of the picture. When tigers disappear, it is the clearest indication that the forest they inhabited is not what it once was. Our version of the Arctic's now-iconic polar bears, stranded by global warming on melting ice floes, is the tiger.
In India, the number of tigers - excluding in the Sunderbans delta which may have a few dozen - has sunk to just over 1,400, confirming the most pessimistic estimates of conservationists who have been struggling for years to challenge and assist a government in denial or paralysis.
In an echo of Sumatra, protection staff, where they exist at all, are middle-aged, under-funded, under-equipped and under-motivated - and often up against young poachers run by sophisticated international criminal syndicates.
India now has an ambitious, US$154 million (S$218 million) plan to move human habitation out of core tiger habitats and create eight new tiger reserves.
But most of the money will go to relocation of villages, potentially leaving protection again neglected. And there are still plans to build highways through tiger habitats. Indonesia launched a 'Conservation Strategy and Action Plan of Sumatran Tiger 2007-2017' at last year's Climate Change Convention in Bali.
But 'there is no effective enforcement on the ground', notes Kuala Lumpur- based Chris Shepherd of TRAFFIC.
'It boils down to lack of resources. Wildlife crime isn't viewed as a high priority in Indonesia or anywhere in South- east Asia.'
There is an ongoing attempt by China's State Forestry Administration to open up the trade in tiger parts.
The rationale offered is that a flood of supplies from farmed tigers - of which China has upwards of 5,000 - will drive prices down and eliminate incentives for poachers.
But the push to open the trade has more to do with making money for farmers than saving wild tigers.
It costs around US$4,000 to raise a tiger to adulthood in a farm, but less than US$20 to have one killed by a poacher in the wild. The price differential, which is impossible to bridge, is only one reason why the propaganda of the farmers collapses.
But scientists of the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the British-based Panthera Foundation tabled plans in New Delhi last Thursday - and in effect challenged governments - to create an 8,000-km corridor extending from Bhutan through India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam for tigers.
It is a grand scheme strewn with obstacles, but it is possible - and could save the tiger on the Asian mainland.
Noted Dr Alan Rabinowatz, director of science and exploration at the WCS: 'We're not asking countries to set aside new parks to make this corridor a success.
'This is more about changing regional zoning in tiger range countries to allow tigers to move more freely between areas of good habitat.'
