If you want to know why jaguars are disappearing from the wild in the Americas, you need to look beyond for an answer. China, to be more precise.
Iconic big cats are being killed for their fangs and other body parts so they can be used in traditional Chinese medicine, conservationists say.
China’s powerful economic influence has spread across the globe to Central and South America, where the Asian nation is a major investor in its countries, with investments worth nearly $ 306 billion in 2018 alone. Chinese companies have been investing heavily in the countries of the region by building their infrastructure, such as roads, ports, airports, and pipelines.
“Essentially, these projects act as giant wildlife vacuums that suck up everything in China,” observes Vincent Nijmana, a conservation researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
This is because unreliable operators in the Asian nation have also gained access to the continent’s exotic animals through the global illegal wildlife trade, much of which goes back to consumers in China.
“These projects are run by Chinese workers and they come and go with local people and also send things to their families in China,” says Nijman. “Among the things they send are illicit bones, horns and skins valued by traditional medicine. There are not many signs that they use moderation. At the end of the day, almost everything that can be killed and changed will be.
Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners believe that exotic animal body parts such as tigers, rhinos, and pangolins have healing properties. Such atavistic and unscientific beliefs have been a scourge in exotic wildlife across the globe, from Southeast Asia to Africa and South America.
Tiger bones, for example, are ground into powder before mixing with other ingredients. The mixture is consumed by people who believe that the resulting potion has powerful medicinal properties.
The tigers in the wild they are on their last legs, with the total number of majestic predators at less than 5,000, compared to 100,000 estimated just a century ago. With the tiger population plummeting, illegal wildlife smugglers are turning to other high-level predators like jaguars as alternatives.
Nijman and other researchers studying wildlife trafficking in Latin American countries have just published an article in the journal Conservation Biology in which they examined factors such as corruption rates, the level of Chinese investments and the income of citizens in 19 countries in Central and South America. Their results show that in countries with higher rates of corruption and Chinese private investment but lower per capita incomes, there have been a much higher number of jaguar seizures than in other countries.
“About 34% (32 of 93) of the seizure reports from the jaguar side were linked to China, and these seizures contained 14 times as many individuals as were destined for domestic markets,” the researchers explain. “Source countries with relatively high levels of corruption and Chinese private investment and low per capita incomes had 10 to 50 times more jaguar seizures than the rest of the countries included in the sample.”
Thaís Morcatty, a wildlife researcher at Oxford Brookes University, notes that many seizures of jaguar parts have been linked to illegal wildlife markets in Asia. “Last year, there were more than 50 seizures of packages containing jaguar parts in Brazil,” says Morcatty. “Most of them appear to have been destined for Asia and China in particular. It is also worth noting that there are large Chinese communities in Brazil. “
During the 20th century, jaguars almost became extinct because the demand for their skins and other body parts was very high. Thanks to rigorous conservation efforts, the population of top-level carnivores has been slowly recovering, so it is now estimated that there are currently 64,000 jaguars roaming the wild.
However, jaguars continue to face a variety of threats throughout their ranges, from habitat loss and forest fragmentation to retaliatory killings by people for their attacks on livestock. The illicit trade in jaguar parts is now contributing greatly to the plight of these majestic creatures.
Article in English.
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