The roar from China’s Year of the Tiger is being picked up by India Inc’s finely-tuned antenna for corporate social responsibility (CSR) ideas. Building awareness on such issues is a great thing. But it is worth wondering whether the public discourse developing around saving the tiger as a result of this CSR upsurge is in the big cat’s long-term interests.
In some ways, the crisis of tiger conservation is similar to the hurdles that mega-industrial projects, from Posco to ArcelorMittal, are facing. It is completely out of sync with the needs of local communities, partly the result of a British colonial legacy that made conservation an exclusionary system. As the global SOS on the plight of the tiger suggests, this method of conservation is impractical in a country like India.
This much is beginning to dawn on conservationists, but growing and increasingly powerful opinion outside these circles is turning approvingly to a fashionable Chinese solution: tiger farms.
The argument runs like this: tigers are increasingly being poached for the supposedly medicinal, aphrodisiac and talismanic powers of their body parts. So, why not meet this demand from tigers bred in farms (like, say, mink fur or crocodile skins) so that poaching becomes uneconomical.
The logic of this solution may be unassailable on paper and, certainly, there are now more tigers being bred in captivity than in the wild. But here’s the thing: in practice, the farm concept patently hasn’t staunched the rapid decimation of the tiger in Asia. Here’s why. First, tiger farms serve to encourage the consumption of tiger parts and this, in turn, fuels demand for and, therefore, the premium on, “authentic” parts from wild tigers, which are considered more potent.
This impact is showing up in steadily rising prices. Six years ago, for instance, the going rate for tiger bones — used to make aphrodisiacs and cure rheumatism and a raft of other ailments — was $3,000 to $5,000 a kg. A single tiger claw — which enjoys high demand for its apparent power to ward off the evil (Indian sadhus love them!) — costs the same amount. These prices have since escalated by 10 to 15 per cent. Growing Asian prosperity would partly explain this inflation. But going by the pro-farm supply-side argument, prices should have been steady or have fallen.
Rising global prices, in turn, are making poaching an even more viable business. First, there’s the sheer cost advantage. Poaching and stripping a wild tiger of its parts is typically done by a three- or four-member local team that charges just $200 all told, less than half the cost of farming the beast. Each middle-man in the chain takes a 15 to 20 per cent mark-up on this paltry cost. By the time the “product” reaches the customer in, say, Shanghai, the mark-ups are so huge that the incentive to save the wild tiger is zero. Poachers do, of course, desist in breeding season so that the source of their livelihood doesn’t vanish but that makes sanctuaries an unwitting haven for poaching!
The conservation bandobust in India also acts as a disincentive. Apart from displacing local communities and providing them a few alternative livelihoods, forest guards, the frontline of the anti-poaching effort, remain poorly paid (at a little above the minimum wage of Rs 3,000 a month), equipped and trained.
Also, with forests being a concurrent subject in the Indian Constitution, it has been difficult for Project Tiger to translate an essentially sound concept into an exercise of institutional excellence. The uneven performance of Centrally-funded parks is testimony to this. The better performing parks are those that derive revenues from tourism that create jobs for local villagers. More enlightened park directors, as in Kanha, shrewdly reserved a percentage of funding for village development, immediately giving local people a stake in saving the tiger. Unfortunately, tigers themselves are unaware of Centre-state distinctions so they often stray out of sanctuaries into state-administered “reserve forests” where they remain most vulnerable to poaching.
The short point is that there are no short cuts or easy solutions to wildlife conservation. If there’s a template of sorts, it lies in Africa where a powerful campaign against trade in elephant parts and ivory went hand in hand with military-style vigilance on poaching and, most crucially, local community involvement in saving the elephant. Poaching, thus, is down to the minimum and Africa often finds itself having to cull elephant populations to restore the natural balance. Here in India, the success in conserving the rhino in Kaziranga stands as a model example.
If India Inc wants to make a useful contribution to saving the tiger, it would do better to generate campaigns that make the use of tiger parts appear socially unacceptable. The West achieved just that with campaigns against fur. So much so that those who wear even farm-cultivated fur today are considered fairly low down the social food chain.
