An article in the April 19th issue of The Economist, “Market Failure,” reports on the problems of the (illegal) market for tiger parts in China. The medicinal uses for tiger parts and products, including the tiger-bone wine so heavily lobbied-for by the Chinese delegation to April’s Global Tiger Forum, create a huge market in China that is stoppered by a 1993 ban on tiger parts trade. Since then, Chinese breeders have raised 5000 tigers on farms, which was previously not possible. To solve the persistent issues of poaching and billions of dollars lost to illegal trade, China proposes to release these captive tiger parts to the market around its prior ban on what it claims are “wild tiger” parts. Conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Protection Society of India argue that the wild tigers, already under enormous pressure from poaching, habitat destruction, and “loss of prey species,” would be driven to extinction by the opening of the tiger-parts market. Perversely, wild tiger parts are not only more desirable for their perceived potency, but they are also cheaper as a result of simple poaching being tens of times cheaper than raising: “It costs thousands of dollars to raise a tiger in a cage but as little as $20 to hire a poor peasant to poach one.”
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