Publication: Daily Nation
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Page:15A
Paper Date: Wed, Dec 20, 2000
Byline:
Compiled by Terry Ally
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Page sponsored by The Tourism Development Corporation |
by David Morgan
IT IS thousands of years old and has the power to cure what ails you, but its effect on wildlife gives environmentalists the heebie-jeebies.
Traditional Chinese medicine, once the province of Chinese shop owners and Western hippies, has become a billion-dollar international industry in recent years, offering cures effective enough to attract research dollars from modern pharmaceutical companies.
But wildlife experts warn that the healing art, whose origins are said to date from the third millennium B.C., is endangering growing numbers of the wild animals and plants that provide ingredients for its treatments.
More than 20 years ago, environmentalists sounded alarms about the rampant poaching of African and Asian rhinos for rhino horn, which is said to cure fever and delirium.
Now the international body that oversees trade in wild species is scrutinising a growing number of plants and animals affected by demand for traditional Chinese medicine.
"Where years ago it was sort of a fringe thing, (traditional Chinese medicine) accounts for close to half the new species we look at," said Susan Lieberman, a United States Fish & Wildlife official who sits on a scientific advisory panel to the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES).
CITES, a treaty signed by 152 countries, governs trade in more than 30 000 protected plant and animal species.
Before wrapping up meetings in West Virginia last week, CITES officials reviewed trade and conservation data on traditional Chinese medicine-affected species from seahorses and fresh-water turtles to Asiatic black bear and Indian cobra.
Lieberman's panel concluded that skyrocketing demand for the musk of Siberian musk deer from Russia and China may be unsustainable because of over exploitation, poaching and the destruction of wild habitat.
Ninety per cent of the musk trade is linked to traditional Chinese medicine, which uses musk grains to treat heart disease and other complaints.
CITES officials say demand for traditional Chinese medicine products is being driven by economic growth in East Asia, particularly China, where development is rapidly destroying natural habitats.
The fall of the Soviet Union also has brought lax regulation in regions where many of the animals range.
Estimates of the Chinese medicine market, from $6 billion to $20 billion, encompassing China to Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and the burgeoning Asian communities of North America.
Environmentalists are working with Chinese medicine practitioners and the Chinese government to encourage herbal alternatives.
But with double-digit growth expected over the next several years, and studies on traditional Chinese medicine appearing in Western periodicals such as the Journal Of The American Medical Association, experts say the threat to wild species is unlikely to abate.
"Along with this has come growth in the use of wildlife species," said Ginette
Hemley, vice-president for species conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. "The big concern has been with species that are critically endangered. But now there are species that are not as yet critically endangered."
A decade ago, illegal trade in tiger bones for traditional Chinese medicine energised a preservation movement that stamped out any suggestion of legitimising trade in tiger parts.