Wildlife poaching in India has gone up at an alarming rate following increased demand for products manufactured from animal parts in the entire South-East Asia, said Ms Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia Regional Director for International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Ms Gabriel was here last week to attend a four-day conference on Asia for Animals, 2007, which concluded on Friday.

Talking to The Tribune about wildlife and its protection in Asia and particularly India, she said, "Take the case of Sariska (Sariska Tiger Reserve Park in Rajasthan) which is meant to be a tiger reserve, but there are no tigers there. This means the authorities concerned failed to take any action while poaching went on for years. For obvious reasons, they turned a blind eye."

Born in China, Ms Gabriel now works at the IFAW office in the USA. She said the Indian laws concerning wildlife and animals were far advanced as compared to China, but were not enforced properly.

She said wildlife protection agencies in India lacked basic equipment. "The forest rangers do not even have proper boots, flashlights, raincoats, least to speak of firearms to prevent poaching."

Talking in general about Asia, Ms Gabriel, a former journalist, said the problem of poaching wildlife in China had acquired dangerous proportions as there was a sudden demand for wildlife products like tiger skins, claws and ivory following the opening up of the economy.

She said, "Though the penalties are very high in China, but there is hardly any enforcement of laws meant for the protection of wildlife and that gives an opportunity to the nouveau-riche to stimulate illegal trade in wildlife products.

"After drug trafficking, smuggling of wildlife is the second largest trade in the world as it fetches huge returns and the punishment is very low." Ms Gabriel said poaching of Panda, which is the national animal of China, attracts capital punishment there but it was rarely enforced.

"In India, at least you have anti-cruelty law, but in China no such law exists," she added.

Comparing the tiger population in India with China, she said the tiger population in China was hardly 50 and that too it was not known whether their habitat was in China or in the bordering areas with Russia and Myanmar.

During her deliberation at the conference, Ms Gabriel tried to mobilise opinion against "tiger farming", which in fact was leading to more demand of "tiger products and was far more expensive than tiger poaching".

She pointed out that according to traditional Chinese medicine, body parts of tigers, bears and rhinos were used for various ailments, but alternative medicines were available and the use of animal body parts were not backed by science.

Arguing strongly against "tiger farming", which was being widely practised in China, she told the conference that allowing tiger farming for legal trade was in fact stimulating and promoting poaching and illegal trade.

Quoting a World Bank economist, she said poaching a wild tiger in India costs at most between $20 and $40 while the poachers and middlemen make a profit of maximum $100 from each tiger killed.

"In contrast, estimates suggest that the cost of maintaining a domestic bred tiger in captivity is between $3000 to $10,000, depending on the scale of farming and location," she pointed out.

Though real statistics were not available, approximately 15 to 20 per cent of Indian tigers were killed for their bones, skins, teeth and claws each year for the Chinese market.

Ms Gabriel told the conference that the price put on a tiger bred in captivity was $40,000 and asked, "Just think how many people would literally kill a tiger for that $ 40,000 - in the 13 tiger range countries in Asia." Apart from tiger products, she said Chinese love ivory and India being close to the country, a large quantity of ivory was smuggled to China.