CAMBODIA

Running Out of Lives

For Cambodia, the plight of the tiger is just one more on a long list of problems. Still, it's an issue the government does seem to be taking seriously. Sadly, it may be too late

By Brian Mockenhaupt/PHNOM PENH

Issue cover-dated June 21, 2001

WITH A DEAD MONKEY in one hand and a land mine in the other, Lain Sothy walked into the forest. He knew that if he got lucky he could earn more there in a week than in four years of farming. Picking just the right spot, he set the monkey on the mine and went away. When he returned a few days later, his prize was waiting for him: a dead tiger.

He carried the skin and bones home to dry over a fire, drawing unwanted attention. "Because the smell was so terrible, my neighbours came to my house and asked 'What animal is that?'," he says. Lain Sothy sold the tiger, but wildlife officials and local police, tipped off by villagers, tracked him down and gave him an ultimatum: Stop hunting or face trouble from the law.

Today, a year later, Lain Sothy is no longer hunting tigers--he's helping to save them. The hunter-turned-ranger earns his living patrolling the forests near the border with Vietnam, educating villagers about wildlife conservation and urging fellow hunters to stop poaching endangered species.

The project is part of an impressive list of steps Cambodia is taking to save its wildlife: Helped by international groups, the government has staged sting operations to rescue tigers; an armed quick-reaction force is being assembled to break up poaching and trafficking rings; wildlife and forestry staff are using satellite navigation systems and images to pinpoint illegal activity; and the government is drafting long-awaited laws on forestry and wildlife that will be among the most thorough in Southeast Asia.

Yet the outlook for Cambodia's tigers remains dismal. In recent years, scores have been killed by poachers and there may soon be too few to ensure a viable breeding population in the wild. Weak existing laws mean little or no punishment for hunters and wildlife traders, while many villagers have no better way to earn a living. The police and the military, meanwhile, are often involved in the trade or turn a blind eye.

Cambodia is hardly alone: Across Asia, wildlife is under threat (see box on page 76). Habitat is being lost to logging and poorly planned development; borders are porous, making smuggling easy. And while supply is dropping, demand remains strong, pushed by a hunger--in China in particular--for rare animals for food and traditional medicines. "China and Vietnam are the Hoover vacuum cleaner for wildlife in Southeast Asia, so it's never going to go away," says Todd Sigaty, an environmental lawyer who helped design the new Cambodian draft laws on forestry and wildlife. "You can make some gains," he says, "but it's a losing battle."

For much of the past three decades, almost nothing was known about Cambodian wildlife. The Khmer Rouge regime and 20 years of civil war closed off much of the country to biologists. But when conservation groups began exploring the country in the mid-1990s, they found encouraging signs--plenty of animals and largely intact habitats.

In 1998, the Cambodian Wildlife Protection Office and the conservation group Cat Action Treasury estimated there were between 400 and 600 tigers in Cambodia. Since then, at least 200 tigers have been killed, says Sun Hean, deputy director of the wildlife office and leader of the tiger conservation programme. Some say the tigers have now been poached past the point of no return, but Sun Hean still has hope. "The first thing we need to do is stabilize the population," he says. "We want to maintain the population and in maybe five or 10 years it will come up a little bit, step by step."

Turning poachers into rangers is one step. There are now 35 unarmed former hunters like Lain Sothy, who are paid about $70 per month--three times the per-capita income--and divide their time between educating villagers and watching for poachers. But though the rangers are happy with their new jobs, the problem is obvious: The government can't afford to turn every hunter into a gamekeeper. For the bulk of impoverished rural Cambodians, the easy money from poaching is hard to resist. That's why it's not enough to threaten hunters with punishment, says David Smith, a professor of conservation biology who has worked on similar programmes in Nepal and Thailand. To gain community support, there must be an alternative, whether it is ecotourism, agriculture cooperatives or small loans to start businesses.

For now, poaching continues. In the Cardamom mountains of southwestern Cambodia, where 10 former hunters patrol the forests, three tigers were killed in March alone. No matter how many villagers are educated or how many hunters become rangers, wildlife officials admit there will always be someone willing to kill a tiger for money. People like the 60-year-old man dubbed the "rogue hunter" by Sun Hean. In a brief forest encounter in 1999, the man told wildlife officials he had killed 60 tigers in recent years. He pays villagers $50 if they can lead him to tracks and he earns $1,500-$2,500 for each tiger he bags.

From there the price goes up as the tiger is cut into parts and passed on from middlemen to the final buyers, who are often from outside Cambodia. A skin can fetch $900, a canine tooth goes for $125 and a claw brings $10. In one Phnom Penh shop, a tiger penis goes for $800. But the most popular parts are the bones. "If old people have rheumatism, this can help," says Heang Lang, who keeps a stock of bones in the backroom of her family's traditional Chinese pharmacy in Phnom Penh. The bone is slowly cooked until it is a black lump, then shaved down and put into wine or food.The customers are mostly wealthy older people, from Korea, Taiwan and Japan. "If they don't have money, they can't have it, because it's very expensive," she says.

The bones sell for $400 a kilogram--with one tiger averaging 12 kilograms of bone. The price is high because times have changed since the store opened more than 20 years ago. Before, it was easy to find tiger bones. "Now it's difficult," Heang Lang says, "because they've killed nearly all the tigers."

Around the corner from the pharmacy, there are shops where you can buy dozens of wildlife products--dried frogs, monkeys, antlers, entire skins of black bears--and restaurants, where you can choose from a number of animals that by law are not allowed to be sold, let alone cooked. But, as one shop owner explains, officials never come by. If they did, there's not much they could do. Under current laws, fines range from $2.60 to just $260. It's not illegal to possess protected wildlife, while a poacher can only be arrested if he's caught actually killing the animal.

The new draft wildlife law introduces a permit system for possessing wildlife. It also sets jail terms of up to five years and fines of up to five times the market value of the endangered animal--a fine of more than $30,000 for a tiger. While the wildlife law is months away from being presented for passage, key parts of it were included in a draft forestry law that is due shortly to go before the National Assembly. Failure to pass it could cost Cambodia millions of dollars in loans from the International Monetary Fund, which has set forestry reform as a condition for lending.

But laws are only as good as the people who implement them, and in Cambodia there have been plenty of problems, from soldiers who poach animals to border police who don't know what to look for or are bribed to look the other way. The agencies are slowly being trained and professionalized, but salaries are so low that many soldiers and policeman turn elsewhere to supplement their incomes. For wildlife officials there is the added problem of pushing an issue that scarcely figures on the political agenda.

In recent years, conservation in Cambodia has received a huge boost from a half-dozen international wildlife groups that have set up shop here. Armed with plenty of cash, they've surveyed little-known areas of the country and launched community-based conservation programmes. But they also issue demands on what programmes they want to do and how they want the projects to run. Smith, who helped launch Cambodia's tiger-conservation programme, calls it "ecocolonialism" and says the government needs to be firm in establishing its own priorities and policies.

Nonetheless, there's agreement that Cambodia is moving in the right direction. But will it get there in time to save the last of its tigers? "I would be an absolute dreamer if I say we could save everything on the endangered list," says Patrick Lyng, a retired United States wildlife agent and adviser to Cambodia's government.

He adds, "If we can increase the risk of getting caught, maybe we can take some people out of the business. And if we can take some of those people out of the business, maybe we can increase the longevity of that species. I don't know any other way to tackle it."