China to lift ban on sale of tiger bones

Tiger bones will go back on sale because market forces are too strong to resist, a senior China conservation official was reported as saying in the domestic media today, raising fears of a lifting of the trade ban on one of the world's most endangered species.

China - the biggest market for traditional medicines made from tiger parts - has banned sales for 14 years as part of a global effort to save the animal from extinction.

But it has come under intense pressure from domestic tiger farmers to re-open the lucrative business. Wang Wei, deputy director of the department of wildlife conservation of the state forestry administration, said a change of policy is inevitable.

"The issue is open for review," he told the state-run China Daily newspaper. "The ban won't be there forever, given the strong voices from tiger farmers, experts and society."

China's population of wild tigers has almost been wiped out, with only 50 left in the north-east of the country. But commercial farmers have reared about 5,000 in captivity. Each year, 1,000 new cubs are born.

At present the valuable carcasses, bones and penises cannot be legally sold so they are kept in freezers after the animals die. Several huge farms face ruin because they have speed-bred thousands of tigers, which are worthless until the ban is lifted.

Mr Wang argued this was an unnecessary economic loss. "It will be a waste if the resources of dead tigers are not used in traditional medicine," he said.

Any shift in China's stance would prompt international outrage. Despite promises that captive-bred tigers would be tagged to distinguish them from wild animals, conservationists fears that any re-opening of the market would accelerate poaching. At a meeting in the Hague last week, John Sellar, senior enforcement officer at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, criticised the captive-breeding programmes as having "limited" potential for conservation.

Mr Wang said some of the captive population could be reintroduced to the wild. But there is no successful case of this happening in China. Conservation groups say farm-bred tigers cannot survive in forests and jungles because they are too tame.

They accuse the farmers of racing to increase the captive stock - despite overcrowded cages and the dilution of genetic quality - to blackmail the government into a change of policy.

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