11/19/2010

Wildlife group targets Myanmar-China tiger trade

BANGKOK (AP) — Wildlife trafficking officials say they have reached a preliminary agreement with an ethnic minority group in Myanmar to close down markets where hundreds of poached tigers from across Asia are sold for use in purported medicines and aphrodisiacs in China.

The markets, in an area of northeastern Myanmar controlled by the Wa minority, are considered one of the world's hot spots for wildlife trafficking, and among the only places left where tiger parts are openly sold.

"Basically closing these markets will alleviate pressure on all of Southeast Asia's tiger populations because the sourcing is being done from areas as far away as India and Sumatra," said William Schaedla of the wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC. "If we were to close these markets it would stop the drain on those source populations of tigers."

Schaedla, TRAFFIC's Southeast Asia director, spoke ahead of a "tiger summit" in St. Petersburg, Russia, aimed at saving the endangered species from extinction. There are believed to be as few as 3,200 wild tigers remaining, down from about 100,000 a century ago — a decline of 97 percent.

The Nov. 21-24 conference, hosted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, will attempt to finalize a plan to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022. It is being described as the first international meeting on a single wildlife species.

"If the markets are not closed, we will see the end of all tigers," Schaedla told a press conference Friday. None of the goals set at the St. Petersburg summit can be reached if the illegal wildlife trade in the Thailand-Myanmar-China border region is not stopped, he said.

Read more at Google Hosted News

Nov 19, 2010 11:03:07 AM | Animals, Current Affairs

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Nobel Response Puts China in Bad Company Concerned above all with domestic political stability, China’s leaders have often displayed an almost Teflon indifference to foreign criticism of their human-rights practices. But even the most thick-skinned Communist Party politicos are likely to wince at the kind of company Beijing finds itself in with its handling of newly minted Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. European Pressphoto AgencyLiu Xiaobo and Carl von Ossietzky We’re not talking about the list of countries that have said they’ll boycott this year’s awards ceremony in Oslo. So far, five nations, in addition to China, have said they plan to steer clear of the Peace...
PREVIOUS POST
What Inflation In China Feels Like Inflation according to the KFC Index. Investors are worried about the latest headlines reporting inflation in China, but average people here have felt the effects of unreported inflation for the last two years, and especially the last 12 months. You have already heard of a few items in China whose prices have spiraled out of control — houses, for one; garlic, for another — but at least not everyone needs to buy a house, and not everyone absolutely needs to eat garlic. But you’d like to eat eggs and pork, right, and cook them using some oil? (Maybe with some...