Tiger Poaching and Solutions
Monday, 13. October 2008, 00:54:54
One thing I've been working on recently is a paper on the black-market in China for tiger-products.
Figure: Polished Sumatran Tiger Canine
Essentially, if we don't understand how this market is organised and what drives the participants, reducing poaching will be much harder.
Here's a brief outline of the main points.
What this basically means is that poaching isn't going to be stopped in most places by law enforcement. And we can't realistically stop the flow over the Chinese border. And if the distributions are small and secretive, then good luck to anyone trying to catch them.
Figure: Polished Sumatran Tiger Canine
Essentially, if we don't understand how this market is organised and what drives the participants, reducing poaching will be much harder.
Here's a brief outline of the main points.
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There is no single black market for tiger-products. The Chinese black-market is about two products- skins and bones. The market has geographical separation. Amur (Siberian) tigers are found in the North-East, Indo-Chinese and Bengalis in the South-East, and Bengalis in the West. So far these markets are not connected.
Demand is medicinal. The chief source of demand for bone is medicinal. Demand has been suppressed by Chinese law enforcement but demand has not been stigmatized. The likelihood that education campaigns will reduce demand by enough does not look credible.
And most importantly- people aren't smuggling tiger-penises into China. The payoff for such aphrodisiacs aren't economic. Nobody spends $US50k for a hard-on.
There is no single smuggling mode. Tiger products have entered China via bus, train, truck, plane and boat. Smugglers have a large number of potential crossing points and modes of transport. Tiger parts are a also very low volume product. Together this means that interdiction rates are dismal, and the prospect for improvement weak.
Real tiger products have different distribution channels. In the West, Tibetan connections have increased the penetration of tiger skins into Qinghai and Gansu. In other regions bone is traded secretly with few intermediaries. This is likely to reflect the harsh, punitive penalties involved if caught.
It's not that profitable. A lot of conservation literature claims that tiger smuggling is extremely profitable. E.g. EIA says that if a tiger costs $1500 to poach and sells for $16,500 in China, the profit is 900%. Sure, if the poacher can teleport instantly, without negotiation costs, risks and transport costs the product to the customer. The reality is that wildlife is like every other illegal market. Most of the final price comes from transport costs, compensating participants for the risks and the like. Just like drugs, procurement costs are a trivial part of the price. It's the distribution network that takes the real commitment of resources.
Poachers are hard to catch Expert hunters wandering around forests in Asia can evade capture for years. Some of the participants have been at it since the 1970s. The very environment that tigers live in hinders effective policing by (under-resourced and sometimes corrupt) local rangers. If it takes 10+ years to crack a smuggling ring, then the smugglers are in the driving seat.
What this basically means is that poaching isn't going to be stopped in most places by law enforcement. And we can't realistically stop the flow over the Chinese border. And if the distributions are small and secretive, then good luck to anyone trying to catch them.
WIDGETIZE
Words # 13. October 2008, 06:53
Chthoniid # 13. October 2008, 19:33
In other Asian countries where local hunters are often in conflict with central Government (there are often ethnic differences, or local forest inhabitants resent government interference with their customs etc), protecting tigers at the source is immeasurably more difficult.
I don't think law enforcement is going to be as effective further up the supply chain, largely because smugglers have enough strategies to use to evade detection. The border is vastly larger than say, the US-Mexican border and we know how successful the US has been at stopping drugs and illegal immigrants getting across that barrier...
Other than that, tiger sumggling has to become a lot less profitable. I'm open to suggestions, but the only option that looks vaguley feasible is using a 'legal' source of tiger parts to end the smuggler's monopoly.
Thoughts on the current financial crisis probably belong to a different post, but I'll note that once again, the peculiar institutions of the US mortgage lending industry remain the Achille's heel of the financial system...
Carol # 16. October 2008, 18:29