New Delhi, March 25, 2010: While a number of decisions in the 15th CITES Conference of the Parties (CoP 15) in Doha, Qatar, swayed against conservation, elephants and tigers were a little less unfortunate with the parties voting against ivory trade and breeding tigers for their body parts.

Proposals by Tanzania and Zambia to downlist their elephant populations were rejected on Monday. Reopened again today, the parties voted against the downlisting and upheld their earlier rejection.

Conservationists argue downlisting the protection to selective elephant populations and making negative amendments in the moratorium in one-off sale of stockpile ivory can have a disastrous impact on other elephant populations, including those in Asia.

“The fate of elephants in Asia as well as in Africa would have been gravely compromised, had the downlisting been approved. We have been saying this for a long time. Any move to facilitate African elephant ivory trade, even regulated, can, and have earlier been proven to impact Asian elephants too. It’s only logical that there would be attempts to launder illegal ivory into the mainstream market. The same goes for tigers too,” said Ashok Kumar, Vice-chairman, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI).

For the tigers, although no greater protection was accorded, the parties reaffirmed an earlier decision that countries should not breed tigers for trade of their parts and derivatives. Decision 14.69 from CoP14 stated, “Parties with intensive operations breeding tigers on a commercial scale shall implement measures to restrict the captive population to a level supportive only to conserving wild tigers; tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivative”.

Recent investigations in China revealed an increase in the illegal sale of products from tiger farming operations claiming to contain tiger parts, both online and in stores. While there are fewer than 50 wild tigers left in China, tiger farms collectively have over 6000 tigers and boast an annual reproduction rate of 1000. Operated also as safari parks for tourists, these tiger farms openly sell products such as ‘tiger bone wine’ as health tonics.

“We narrowly avoided making the Year of the Tiger into the Year of the dead tiger,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia Regional Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “Illegal trade of tiger parts and products from farming operations are already stimulating demand for dead tigers which fuels poaching of wild tigers.”

“While we had hoped that a previous resolution on Conservation of and Trade in Tigers and other Asian Appendix I Asian Big Cat Species could have been strengthened at this CoP by prohibiting the breeding of tigers for commercial trade, we are glad that the hard-fought decision from CoP14 was retained. We are thankful that there is still a thin line of defense between farming tigers for commercial trade and the world’s remaining wild tigers, with less than 3,200 left,” Gabriel added.

The CoP 15 decisions on elephants and tigers came as relief to conservationists disappointed by the outcomes with respect to other species including the polar bear and the bluefin tuna. Respective proposals by the US and Monaco to upgrade protection to the two species were defeated.