http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1618565,00.html?cnn=yes
Keeping U.S. Turtles Out of China
Malayan
box turtles rest in a pond at Hong Kong's Kadoorie Farm and Botanic
Garden. The reptiles were among a cargo of 10,000 turtles which were
being shipped from Southeast Asia to markets in mainland China when
they were intercepted by Hong Kong customs officials.
Bobby Yip / Reuters / Corbis
Globalization has brought Americans tech support from India, Chinese-made
Christmas lights, T-shirts from Bangladesh and those inexpensive Aussie wines,
but U.S. conservationists are sounding the alarm that global trade is a two-way
street that threatens American wildlife — thanks to rising economic tides in
Asia and the fast and easy import-export routes between China and the U.S.
Turtles — except for the occasional slow road-crosser — are not on most
Americans' radar. But the Asian appetite for turtles, whose meat and body parts
are believed to hold a variety of medicinal and life-enhancing qualities, is
creating a global market for U.S. turtles and tortoises.
During the Great
Depression, Americans living near the country's wetlands harvested
high-protein
turtle meat, sometimes so aggressively that it threatened local
species. In the
early 1930s thousands of pounds of terrapin were harvested in Maryland,
but by
1937 the yield had fallen to just 537 pounds, according to Peter Paul
van Dijk,
director of the tortoise and freshwater turtle biodiversity program at
Virginia-based Conservation International (CI). Turtle meat is still
eaten in parts of rural America and there is a growing domestic market
in urban
Asian-American communities. The meat also has found its way onto
high-dollar
menus at fashionable wild game restaurants across the country. But ever
since
China opened up its economy in 1989, conservationists have become
alarmed at
that country's insatiable appetite for turtle meat.
"We have seen the Chinese
trade vacuum out one region after another — Burma, Vietnam, Borneo, Java, then
Sumatra," says van Dijk. Typically, the trade follows a three- to five-year boom
and bust cycle, van Dijk says, adding that 75% of Asia's 90 species of tortoise
and freshwater turtles now are threatened. Worldwide about 40% of long-lived,
slow to mature species are at immediate risk of extinction, according to CI.
Now, conservationists fear the Chinese turtle trade has the U.S. in its sights.
"What we are seeing is the globalization of wildlife," says Matt Wagner, head of
the wildlife diversity program at the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife
(TPWD). After years of little or no regulation of turtle harvesting, the state
began issuing harvest permits and monitoring numbers a decade ago. As the
harvest numbers increased regulators became concerned that turtles may be the
new buffalo: once ubiquitous, now rarely seen thanks to aggressive harvesting in
the 19th century. Later this month, TPWD will hold hearings on proposed rules to
either limit or ban commercial turtle harvesting.
"Bayou Bob" Popplewell, the
owner the Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch south of Dallas, is the founder U.S.
Turtle and Aquatic Resource Technologies (USTART), a cooperative with some 400
members who collect and sell turtles primarily to the Asian market. "This is a
vast renewable resource that we can harvest and manage wisely," Popplewell says.
"These are among the very most adaptive of all wildlife — look around us, city
parks, bar ditches, drainages, every pond and private lake, large impoundments,
creeks, streams, rivers, even literally temporary potholes — yet they are all
actively supporting some level of turtle population," Popplewell says. "State
public waters are huge and so are private waters... and the turtles got there by
default — especially in private waters... the turtles arrive and thrive,
everywhere."
One of his USTART's co-op members, a rancher who harvests turtles
in a 200 acre lake on his land, makes about $2000 in two weeks during
spring and
summer seasons, Popplewell says. Any effort to regulate the Texas
turtle harvest
must deal with the reality that 95% of the land in Texas is in private
hands,
Wagner says. But even in states with large areas of public land the
turtle
harvest debate has been contentious — Minnesota has grappled with the
issue for
over a decade. Other states have banned commercial harvesting of wild
turtles —among them Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina and Alabama
and just last
month, Maryland. But until now, Texas was one of a handful of states
that
remained wide open.
Popplewell, who wants more hard numbers on the effect of
wild turtle harvesting, says as a bottom line he could support banning
harvesting in public wetlands and waterways — in fact, he urges his co-op
members not to collect there and he does not collect certain species of turtle.
Four land turtles in Texas are defined by the state as threatened.
It is
estimated that 31.8 million turtles, 97% farm-raised, were exported out of the
U.S. between 2002 and 2005, according to a study by the World Chelonian Trust.
The turtle traders have not focused on harvesting in Africa or Latin America,
largely because transportation logistics and costs are not competitive there,
van Dijk says. Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is a major regional shipping point for
turtles collected in the wild and harvested on turtle farms in Oklahoma and
Louisiana. The turtles are packed in containers and shipped by air to Asia.
Customs officials at both ends monitor the shipments, but accurate numbers and
reliable records of which species are being exported are not complete,
conservationists say.
"The Chinese face the same problems as the U.S. officials — they simply
can't inspect every single shipment, but they are on the right
track," van Dijk says. China has signed on some key international
monitoring
rules, but the scale of trade makes oversight difficult.
There also have been
efforts to establish a turtle-farming industry in China — Popplewell has
exported breeding stock from Texas — and a recent study co-authored by van Dijk
found about 1000 turtle farms in China. But van Dijk says the farms cannot
support the rising demand in a country where incomes are also rising. Wild
turtles are still valued by consumers over farm-raised stock and Chinese turtle
farmers prefer wild breeding stock. Turtles may be slow movers, but when they
escape farms they can pose a breeding and disease threat to already diminished
local species.
The challenge, TWPD's Wagner says, is to keep abreast of all the
changing forces in the wildlife global marketplace. It is not just American
turtles that are in the spotlight. The proposed Texas rules will look at the
harvesting of other species including lizards and snakes. Wildlife management is
not just about checking fishing and deer hunting licenses any more; it's gone
global. What's next? "Bayou Bob" Popplewell says he is already discussing a
potential Chinese market for the feral hogs that plague so many Texas ranchers.
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