Misplaced faith in the market

Bittu Sahgal

• Just let us mine iron ore from Kudremukh and we will give you so much money that you will be able to save all the wildlife in the Western Ghats.

• Let us run oil pipelines through the Marine National Park at Pirotan and we will give you so much money you will be able to save all the marine life off the coast of Kutch and Saurashtra.

• Let us drill for gas off the coast of Orissa and we will pay you enough to save every Olive Ridley turtle on the east coast.The promises are endless. but hollow. They are neither made to be kept, nor possible to implement because differing power bases find new promises to make, new forests to ravage, new water to poison. And each indignant project proponent whom we stop at the gates of the Supreme Court bleats like a hurt lamb about how "We love wildlife just like you, but be realistic. You need money to save wildlife and we can give this to you. If you let us take just a little."

In recent times we have begun to hear increasingly loud noises from the corridors of power to the effect that "wildlife can only be saved if it pays for its survival". The insidious suggestion is that a forest must earn money either from tourism, or perhaps by sacrificing a portion of its land for a mine, or subject itself to some commercial exploitation or other.

Another proposition put forward is: "The market can save wildlife." I have monitored and documented a case load of efforts to protect India’s wildlife over the past several decades, and I can categorically state that the only habitats in which wild species are relatively safe are where wildlife has been insulated from the market. I refer here to sanctuaries and national parks which disallow timber felling, mining, agriculture, or even the collection of fruit and seeds. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 protect sanctuaries like Kanha, Gir, Periyar, Kaziranga and Ranthambhore from market interventions. This is why tigers, leopards, barasingha, rhino and elephants still abound in them.

Open the boundaries of these havens to the market and you can kiss the protected species in them goodbye within a decade.

Moreover there is no dearth of those who suggest that you can save, say, crocodiles, or elephants, by ranching them, or by allowing big game hunters to "take out a few tigers to protect the rest". But these people have no long-term success stories to back their wishful thinking. For instance in Asian countries crocodile farmers who claim they are ranching the reptiles sustainably are predictably silent about the fact that the harvested species cannot survive in the wild. The same holds true of elephants in Africa — culled periodically for their ivory — where in living memory nearly a million elephants have vanished.

The fact is the market has no upper cap. Like heroin addiction, the more you supply consumers, the more they demand. But why focus on obvious wildlife species? Why not look at the manner in which the market has impacted the future of fish, the world’s largest ‘market-use of wildlife’.

Has the market helped conserve fish? Or whales? Or dolphins? Or turtles? From the North Sea to the Indian Ocean, the ‘market’ has strip-mined marine species to the point where even the fishing fleets directly responsible for ‘wall of death’ massacres now demand policies that set aside no fishing zones (what we ordinary wildlife-types call sanctuaries) to keep market forces out. In the old days, traditional fishing communities had unwritten laws that proscribed fishing in the rainy season. Now the ‘market’ has intervened and has ‘taught’ traditional fisher folk that those who break this tradition will get richer. Thus we see the market dismantling ancient customs and mores. The result? Fish have no respite even in breeding grounds. This is why some shark species that reach breeding age after 10-15 years find themselves sliced up for shark fin soup at the age of six months or a year. The same holds good for lobsters, crabs. Everything.

In my view the one factor that effectively protects wildlife is inaccessibility. Think about it. The only wild plants and animals that are safe in any significant way on this earth are those which humans cannot reach physically — the deepest oceans, the tallest mountains, the hottest deserts, the coldest poles. In these wildlife havens the influence of the market is negligible. Little wonder they are the only habitats in which nature survives in its rawest, healthiest, most pristine avatars.

What we attempt to do when we declare areas as sanctuaries and national parks is to mimic the protection that comes from natural inaccessibility. And when a prime minister demands that the Kudremukh National Park be mined for iron ore, or a chief minister asks for a nuclear reactor to be built in the Sundarbans, or the World Bank finances a four lane highway through the Nagarjunasagar Tiger Reserve, they negate our efforts to use laws to create inaccessibility. And the result can be predicted as surely as gravity. Nature withers.

India’s protected area network currently extends to less than 5 percent of the total land mass, yet these areas are the source of more than 500 vital rivers and harbour more than 50 percent of all our surviving wild genetic wealth.

Those whose misplaced faith in the market would risk the survival of such factories of life are playing a deadly game of Russian roulette with Mother Earth. They are advocating the ultimate folly of inter-generational colonisation. We know this; they don’t. India needs a massive adult literacy programme; not as much for poor villagers, but for dangerous planners and politicians who sit in judgement over the country’s forests, rivers, swamps and coastlines.

(Bittu Sahgal is the editor of Sanctuary magazine)