New Delhi: Conservationists worldwide congratulated China as it implemented a stronger wildlife trade law and urged it to continue its existing ban on trade in tiger derivatives. 

The new Regulation for Import and Export of Endangered Species of Wildlife, which went into effect yesterday, will enhance China’s ability to combat illegal wildlife trade and to implement the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which China has been a member since 1981.

In an open letter to China’s Premier Wen Jiabao, a group of international conservation organizations which has long worked in China wrote:  “We hope that China, in the spirit of its new CITES implementing law and the upcoming 2008 Green Olympics, will reiterate its commitment to the 1993 ban of trade in all tiger derivatives from all sources, and thereby continue to play a responsible leadership role in protecting the world’s few wild remaining tigers”.

Although CITES had prohibited international tiger trade in 1987, China’s robust internal market for tiger bone continued to threaten tigers in the wild.  In 1993, China took the commendable step of banning all domestic trade in tiger parts and derivatives.

“This ban on trade in tiger parts established China as a true leader in CITES and the global effort to save wild tigers,” says Judy Mills, Director of Save The Tiger Fund’s Campaign Against Tiger Trafficking (CATT).

Since then, tiger bone has been removed from the list of ingredients in the official Chinese pharmacopoeia.  All legal manufacturing of medicines containing tiger bone has been stopped, and all stocks of existing medicines have been locked away under government seal.  Reputable traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) experts support this ban and use substitute ingredients that fully meet the medical needs of their patients.

“The international TCM industry firmly believes that we can have healthy people and a healthy planet,” says Huang Lixin, President of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  “Furthermore, we do not wish TCM contribute to the disappearance of tigers and other endangered species from the wild.”

A recently released comprehensive scientific study of tiger estimates that tiger numbers may have dipped well below 5,000 in the wild from threats of habitat loss, shrinking prey base and poaching for trade. Many experts believe China’s 1993 trade ban is responsible for ensuring that the wild tiger’s status is not even more precarious, for the ban stopped a trade that, according to CITES records, once saw more than 27 million units of tiger-bone medicines sold annually.

“Any resumption in legal domestic trade of tiger parts could be the final act that drives the tiger towards extinction, and we call upon the Chinese government to retain and reinforce its important 1993 trade ban,” says Dr. Susan Lieberman, Director of WWF’s Global Species Program.

Most of China’s remaining wild tigers are found in the Northeast bordering Russia. While these tigers number less than 20, nearly 500 tigers live nearby on the Russian side. If poaching of tigers and their prey stop, China’s wild tiger population could bounce back quickly.