EATING ENDANGERED SPECIES

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http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501051003-1109398,00.html

Asia

Eating Disorder

China's appetite for exotic wildlife has spawned a thriving black market in

Asia's endangered species. Will pangolin be eaten into extinction?

BY SIMON ELEGANT | PALEMBANG

 

KEMAL JUFRI / POLARIS FOR TIME

CHINA-BOUND: Workers in Palembang remove skin from lizards and snakes before

packing them for export

 

Monday, Sep. 26, 2005

It is just after dawn in the hills of South Sumatra, but Jema'ah is hard at

work. Jema'ah, 39, normally feeds his family of four by tramping from village to

village buying vegetables from farmers and then reselling them to dealers, a

practice that nets him about $40 in a good month. Today, if he's lucky, he will

earn twice that in a few hours. " Pangolin are usually asleep in their nests at

this time of day, " he says, squatting down in front of a rabbit-hole-sized

opening in a low embankment. After piling dried leaves and twigs in front of the

burrow, he digs out a box of matches and sets the kindling alight, producing a

thick cloud of white smoke. If the pangolin, a scaly anteater that looks like a

cross between an armadillo and an opossum, isn't smoked out of its lair soon,

Jema'ah (who like most Indonesians goes by one name) will set off again through

the forest, clutching a shopping list of animals that he has been instructed to

seek out by a dealer in illegal wildlife from the coastal town of Bengkulu. " I

never knew before that snakes and turtles were valuable, " Jema'ah says, " let

alone pangolin. " When he started hunting a few years back, the dealer took him

to the zoo in Bengkulu to point out which animals were most profitable. " That

was the first and last time that someone took me to a zoo, " Jema'aah says with a

grin. If he gets really lucky, Jema'ah will come across a tiger's pug marks, the

report of which alone will earn him $5. Fanning the flames in front of the hole,

he shakes his head in bemusement. " It beats me. Why would anyone want a tiger or

a pangolin? "

 

Part of the answer can be found in the Herbal Encyclopedia, a dictionary of

traditional Chinese medicine compiled some four centuries ago that lists 461

animals with organs that purportedly have curative powers. They include the

rapidly vanishing tiger and the unfortunate pangolin. According to the

dictionary, pangolin scales can be " used to cure tumefaction [swelling], promote

blood circulation and help breast-feeding mothers produce milk. " If he wanted a

more up-to-date answer, Jema'ah could also have asked Wei Hong, a Guangdong

native in his mid-30s who developed a taste for pangolin meat when his father

bought some 20 years ago in the hope of curing a skin disease. With the meat now

selling at an exorbitant $100 a kilogram, Wei, a journalist, must depend on

others to indulge his taste for the exotic. He got lucky in January when he

attended a dinner thrown by an executive at a large state-owned company. " They

steamed the pangolin with boiled mineral water instead of normal water, " he

recalls. " The meat tasted really fresh, light and delicious. "

 

China's forests once teemed with pangolin. But the reproductive capacity of the

slow-moving mammal is no match for Chinese appetites, and pangolins have been

all but eradicated on the mainland. Now gourmets, traditional medicine

practitioners and businessmen looking to show off their wealth rely on the likes

of Jema'ah. But even in distant Sumatran forests, the pangolin is growing harder

to find. " I used to catch big ones " of up to 20 kilograms, Jema'ah says. " But

the biggest I catch these days are eight kilos. "

 

Pangolin are not the only species being driven toward extinction across Asia by

China's demand for exotic, edible wildlife. " As purchasing power in China grows,

demand has just exploded, " says James Compton, who runs the Southeast Asia

office of TRAFFIC, the most prominent group fighting the illegal wildlife trade

worldwide. Tim Redford, a Bangkok-based researcher for the conservation group

WildAid, estimates that between 1% and 10% of smuggled animals are seized by

government officials in efforts to combat an illegal industry worth billions of

dollars annually. Between 1999 and 2003, Chinese authorities alone seized 18,850

live endangered wild animals, including lizards, pythons, turtles and rare fish.

The slaughter is so extensive in Asia that traditional sources of supply have

all but dried up for the most popular animals, and traders are forced to go

farther afield to secure their prey. Poachers looking to fill orders for the

popular pig-nosed turtle, which is prized both as a pet and for its meat, have

to venture as far as the remote Indonesian province of Papua. Those pursuing

live reef fish, a Chinese delicacy particularly popular in booming southern

China, have appeared in the Solomon Islands and on the island of Mauritius off

the coast of Africa.

 

A thorough and detailed list of animals that are endangered—and thus banned in

all trade—already exists in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered

Species, which was established in 1975. But huge profits, widespread corruption,

underfunding of enforcement agencies and a lack of political will mean that the

bans enacted in the treaty are often ineffective, conservationists say. " It's a

very pessimistic situation, " Redford says gloomily. Evidence collected by

WildAid suggests that increased seizures in recent years aren't so much evidence

of more vigilance by governments as a sharp growth in the trade itself. A recent

study by Conservation International concluded that worldwide, less than 1% of

natural resource crimes result in punishment or sanctions. Even when lawbreakers

are caught, the study pointed out, existing laws provide very little deterrence

when compared to the potential profits. In the Philippines, for example, illegal

fishing using dynamite and cyanide in the Calamian Islands earns fishermen an

average of $70.57 per trip. The potential fine if they are caught: 9¢.

A longtime wildlife dealer in the Sumatran city of Bengkulu sums up the

problems facing enforcement officers in the region: " We never have to worry

about the police when transporting animals. Most don't even know or care that

it's considered a crime, " he says with a laugh. " And the ones who do are already

in the business and making money themselves. " The combination of soaring demand

and lax enforcement is leading to a potentially catastrophic situation for the

region's wildlife, activists say. " At the current rate there is a very good

chance that we will lose a lot of species before we even know where they are or

anything about them, " says TRAFFIC's Compton.

 

China is not the only culprit, of course. Nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia

and Vietnam all have thriving underground markets in wildlife products. And

dealers from America and Europe travel the region to stock up on snakes, geckos,

flying lizards and other exotic pets. But the sheer scale of demand from China

makes everything else pale into insignificance. Up to 80% of the illegal

wildlife smuggled out of Southeast Asia is headed for China, says Steve Galster,

who heads WildAid's Bangkok office. Illegal traders have had to adapt to the

changed marketplace. " I had to take a crash course in Mandarin, " laughs

Hendrawan, an affable young Indonesian who runs a sprawling wildlife processing

facility in South Sumatra. " My family is Chinese but we don't speak it at home,

so when business began to go through the roof a few years ago, I had to take

lessons. "

 

Hendrawan stands in the slaughtering yard surrounded by piles of yellow and

green intestines, the concrete floor awash with blood. On the right, a group of

men squat on the floor in a row, holding a four-meter reticulated python. Even

in the dim light of the slaughtering shed, the crisscross pattern of green,

yellow, henna and black stripes that gave the snake its name glows with vivid

life. The men flip the wriggling creature over, exposing its white underbelly.

With practiced ease the python is slit open and gutted, then flung into a corner

amidst the hoses and plastic buckets full of blood to await skinning, its

vibrant colors already fading.

 

Other workers are packing skinned and eviscerated water monitors into cardboard

boxes marked " Frozen Fish. " The boxes are stacked onto hand trolleys and rolled

over to one of several refrigerated containers lined up next to each other. One

worker swings open the door, releasing a frigid blast into the humid tropical

air. Inside, hundreds of other boxes stacked from floor to ceiling are visible.

" We can send one or two containers out a week, " Hendrawan says. Chances of

interception on the way to buyers are small. In 2001, for example, China banned

all direct imports of live freshwater turtles from Indonesia in an attempt to

stem the flow, notes Compton of TRAFFIC. The main effect was to force dealers to

find alternate air routes through second countries like Malaysia, he says, or

increase their reliance on the porous land borders. " We pack a layer of legal

turtles on top, then put thousands of illegals underneath, " says the Bengkulu

dealer. " And often it's as easy as just putting a false label on the boxes. The

customs officers in China must think their countrymen eat an awful lot of fish. "

 

One way or another, shipments of endangered species to China will inevitably

start to decline. In a worst-case scenario, supply will simply dry up as animal

populations shrink. Right now, the Chinese " take everything we have, " says

Hendrawan, who runs the reptile abattoir. " They always ask for more, but snakes

are getting harder and harder to find, especially the pythons. The minimum size

is 2.5 meters. It used to be we could find many of even 7 and 8 meters but now

we are happy with 4 meters. " WildAid's Galster says a better solution is to

eliminate demand. " If we could get the Chinese public to stop buying and

consuming this stuff, " he says, " it would have a huge positive impact. "

 

But eating exotic animals and using them for ancient medicines are practices

deeply rooted in Chinese culture. There have been fleeting signs of change. In

June, the soon-to-open Hong Kong Disneyland took shark's fin soup off the menu

following public protests over the damage that widespread consumption of the

popular Chinese dish was doing to global shark populations. During the 2003 SARS

crisis, wildlife activists dared to hope—briefly—that real change was possible.

Scientists concluded that SARS had passed from wild civet cats to humans, most

likely because the civets are a popular winter dish in China's ye wei or " wild

taste " restaurants, which specialize in exotic meats. To safeguard public

health, China's wild animal markets were closed, and ye wei restaurants emptied

out as officials strictly enforced existing laws with frequent inspections and

fines.

 

But within four months, the markets were open again. Now, two years after SARS,

the wildlife trade is back in full swing, albeit more discreetly than before.

Take the Guangzhou Snake Bird Animal Fair Market, the largest animal market in

southern China. While many of the market's sellers appeared to be idling away

their time one recent day, playing mahjong or smoking, their mobiles rang

regularly as restaurants or familiar customers placed orders. " Now deals are

usually carried out at dawn or dusk to avoid government inspectors, " says Lao

Xu, who sells hunting tridents and fermenting jars at the market. " If you want

any wild animal, from Brazil turtles to pangolin, I can arrange for it to be

delivered to your designated restaurant within several hours. "

 

In a twisted way, the animals may yet get their revenge. AIDS is now believed to

have passed from apes to humans through the consumption of chimpanzee meat. SARS

killed 774 people in late 2002 and 2003. A recent report by the New York-based

Wildlife Conservation Society warns that similar outbreaks of exotic and

virulent viruses may become more common as contact between wild animals and

humans in the trade (estimated in the report at 1 billion contacts last year)

increases and hunters venture into remote jungle areas in pursuit of wildlife.

" Outbreaks resulting from wildlife trade have caused hundreds of billions of

dollars of economic damage globally, " the report notes, adding that because it

is centered around a series of well-known hubs, containing the trade would not

be particularly hard. There are some signs that the message is finally sinking

in, says Compton of TRAFFIC. " There's more political will out there to do

something about this issue than there ever has been before, " he says, noting

that the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed in May

to a five-year plan to combat threats to the region's biodiversity. " Now it

remains to be seen if they'll commit the resources to back that up, put their

money where their mouths are. " Last week, amid an outbreak of avian flu in

Indonesia that has sickened 20 and killed two, the U.S. State Department

announced the formation of an international coalition to lobby Asian governments

to tighten the screws on wildlife smugglers. Asia can only hope that it doesn't

take a deadly pandemic to save the pangolin.

 

—With reporting by Zamira Loebis/Bengkulu and Bu Hua/Shanghai

 

 

From the Oct. 03, 2005 issue of TIME Asia Magazine