India's Tiger Threatened by Land use and Parts Demand
12/26/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: India's tigers in new peril Threatened by land use, parts
demand
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 26, 1999
Byline: MIAN RIDGE
NEW DELHI, India -- An alarm sounded around the world when
India's tiger population was found to be teetering on the brink of
extinction in the early 1970s.
In 1972, the government formed Project Tiger to protect the tiger
forests and banned shooting any of India's remaining 1,800 tigers.
Funds flowed in from all over the world and by 1989 the number of
tigers in India had climbed to 4,300.
Today, it stands at around 3,500 and, once again, conservationists are
worried. Shooting for recreation is a distant memory from the British
Raj, but there are now other, less easily controlled threats to
India's big cats.
Population growth and rural development such as the construction of
mammoth dams in some areas are destroying the natural habitats of
tigers. Although trafficking in wildlife products is banned in
India, poaching of tigers for their skin, bones and body parts used in
Chinese medicine has exacerbated the problem.
Could be gone by 2010
``There was a certain euphoria when the number of tigers built
up after the forming of Project Tiger, but now we see it falling again
with habitat destruction and an increase in demand for tiger parts,''
said M.K. Ranjitsinh, director of the World Wild Fund for
Nature's Tiger Conservation Program.
Conservationists say tigers could be extinct by 2010 if steps to save
them are not intensified.
``If we fail to win some of today's battles, tigers will be virtually
extinct by the time of the next Year of the Tiger in 2010,'' Nature
magazine quoted Valmik Thapar, vice chair of a tiger conservation
group, as saying.
Conservationists say it is important to maintain the tiger population
at a certain level for the sake of the ecosystem.
``The tigers are a lifeline for an ecosystem. Everywhere there is a
good tiger habitat it is the sole source of a river system,'' Project
Tiger Director P.K. Sen said. ``If our rivers die, what happens then?
No drinking water, no irrigation, no fresh water. The soil is eroded
without tree cover and civilization in the area is destroyed.''
The best example of the benefits of tiger forests until recently was
the Narmada River, which flows through Kanha Tiger Reserve in the
central state of Madhya Pradesh. The reserve supplied water to the
Narmada even when other sources failed.
But the building of a large dam there is destroying huge tracts of
pristine forest. ``Whenever you construct a dam, a reservoir or a
hydroelectric power plant, it is always on forest land,'' Sen said.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests says 19 percent of
India's land mass is forested, of which nearly half is degraded by
intensive farming, livestock grazing and forest fires. It has
formulated a National Forestry Action Program, which aims to see 33
percent of India forested in 20 years.
Victims of politics
While Project Tiger has succeeded in protecting about 25 of India's
forest reserves, it is the unprotected areas of forest that are most
at risk.
Another factor responsible for the fall in India's tiger population is
the rise of insurgency in some parts of the country, such as the
northeast and Andhra Pradesh in the south.
In Andhra Pradesh, Ranjitsinh says, left-wing extremists called
Naxalites have provoked villagers to kill tigers because the
government was slow to pay villagers for cattle killed by tigers.
``The Naxalites told locals the government wasn't doing anything, so
they should get rid of the tigers themselves. Over 28 animals, both
tigers and leopards, were killed,'' he said.
The Wildlife Protection Society of India estimates that at least 440
tigers have been killed in India in the past six years and believes
that in many cases the bodies were sent abroad for use in Chinese
medicine. ``After 1990, when the numbers began to slide down again, we
found tigers were being killed for their body parts,'' Sen said.
Tiger parts have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for more
than 1,000 years to treat everything from skin disease and convulsions
to laziness. As China's population has exploded and its people have
become more affluent, demand has risen.
Curbing poaching can be difficult because, unlike the past when only
tiger skins and trophies were being sold, today all the parts of a
tiger are being smuggled out of the country.
``What is often forgotten is that it is population growth, mounting
human pressure, that lies behind all threats to tigers,'' Ranjitsinh
said. ``Unless this pressure eases, wildlife will always be in
danger.