In a While, Brazilian Crocodile
11/18/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: FEATURE - In a while, Brazilian crocodile
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 18, 1999
Byline: Noriko Yamaguchi
CACERES - Mosquitoes swarm around Gastao Sharp as he fishes decade-
old crocodile skins out of vats of gooey chemical preservatives that
cannot hide the smell of rotting meat.
But the crocodile breeder is smiling as he counts his huge stock of
Yacare caiman skins - valued for boots, wallets and belts - in a
warehouse on the fringes of the world's largest wetland, Brazil's
Pantanal. He is waiting for the United States to free up a market in
the skins of the once-endangered crocodiles that could be worth some
$200 million.
"Our biggest clients are going to be the Americans, those cowboy-
looking guys who love exotic leather," said the weather-beaten Sharp,
who is revamping his dilapidated crocodile farm in the middle of a
steamy marshland.
The U.S. Department of Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service proposed
reclassifying Yacares as naturally "threatened" rather than
"endangered." This is widely expected to lead the U.S. government to
lift an import ban on products made from the Brazilian reptiles by
the end of this year.
The number of Yacares has more than doubled in recent years after the
Brazilian government banned hunting them in the wild. Local farmers
responded by opening crocodile farms to sell the skins in the still-
legal domestic market.
But the local market was not big enough and dozens of cash-strapped
Pantanal farmers closed their ranches, leaving a handful of
persistent ones like Sharp to tuck away their stocks in vats and wait
for the United States to resume trade.
Now the expected change has prompted the survivors to get back in
business as well, eyeing the lucrative U.S. market. But it has
environmental officials worried that hunters, who still kill the
animals illegally, might come out of hiding.
"Our biggest fear is that the moment the new classification is
announced and the U.S. market opens up, hunters might come back,"
said Fernando de Lava, director of the Environment Ministry's
wildlife management body IBAMA in Brasilia.
IN A WHILE, CROCODILE
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Yacare, found in
Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, as an endangered species in
1970, forcing shoppers on New York's Fifth Avenue and cowboys in
America's West to do without the rare leather.
The U.S. agency said expansion of cattle grazing and potable water
projects in the Pantanal - a swampland half as big as France and home
to thousands of exotic animal species - was destroying the
crocodiles' habitat.
The United States imposed an import ban on products made from the
endangered species and the Brazilian government also prohibited
hunting. Hunting of Yacares was widespread in the 1950s and '60s and
in many cases involved cross-border smuggling as dollar-hungry
Brazilians in the Pantanal tried to make money out of the popular
animal skins.
Some scientists say Brazil may have asked the U.S. government to list
the Yacares as endangered because it wanted to stop the crocodile
contraband that flourished along the Paraguay River, which separates
Bolivia and Paraguay from Brazil in the middle of the Pantanal
swamps.
"When exporting to the United States became impossible, the hunters
also disappeared," said biologist Marco Kloster in Caceres. "Some
people think that Brazil had actually asked the United States for the
import ban because Brazil alone could not have stopped crocodile
smugglers."
Once the Yacares were listed as endangered and hunting became
illegal, local farmers and fishermen started to collect crocodile
eggs and breed the species in man-made reservoirs, giving birth to
the legal farms by the late 1980s.
IBAMA authorised farmers to breed crocodiles on condition that they
return a certain number of young back to nature.
CROWN JEWEL OF LEATHER
With the creation of Yacare farms, more crocodiles started hatching
from protected eggs and biologists became confident the species was
no longer on the brink of extinction.
In fact, some rivers in the Pantanal were so full of Yacares that
government-run groups started worrying hunters would resume their
illegal trade.
While authorities are certain the Yacare population has grown back
over the years, they worry the reopening of the U.S. market may draw
back hunters. Hunting in the wild will remain illegal regardless of
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife action.
"Looking at the number of Yacares out there now, we fear that hunting
might return, posing a new threat to the ecosystem," IBAMA's Lava
said.
The fact that many Yacare ranches have shut down in recent years due
to a lack of business may also woo hunters to the expensive leather.
A wallet made of crocodile skin costs $100, more than twice the cost
of a similar wallet of cowhide.
"If you were to compare it to a stone, the crocodile is like the
diamond," said Kenji Ishii, a jeweller in Sao Paulo's trendy Jardins
neighbourhood who also sells leather goods. "It's natural that poor
farmers see business chances in the animal."