China Offers Financial Bailouts to Help Farmers Transition Away From Wildlife Trade
New initiative set up to help wildlife farmers move towards other practices like growing fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Credit: Amy Jones / Moving Animals
Wildlife farmers in China are being offered financial buyouts for at least 14 species, in a wider move to help stop the consumption of wildlife, reports environmental science news platform Mongabay.
The financial support will compensate farmers for wildlife that has now been made illegal to farm for human consumption, including species such as bamboo rats, palm civets, king ratsnakes and muntjac deer.
The legal and illegal wildlife trade has come under increased scrutiny over the last few months during the current pandemic, with the trade heavily implicated in the spread of deadly zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.
This current scheme to help wildlife farmers transition to other agricultural practices, is part of China’s wider, ongoing plans to reform, and hopefully, in some ways, end, the country’s consumption of wildlife. Following the current pandemic, the Chinese government banned the consumption of wildlife back in February, and is currently revising a draft list of animals that will be classified as ‘wildlife’. The first 14 species that farmers are being compensated for are said to be the first “batch” of outlawed wildlife, with more to follow soon.
Conservationists and campaigners for animals have welcomed the move, and see such schemes as an unprecedented move by the Chinese government to tackle the wildlife trade.
“By subsidising wildlife breeders to transition to alternative livelihoods, these provinces are demonstrating global leadership on this issue, which other provinces and countries must now follow,” Peter Li, China policy specialist of the Humane Society International (HSI), told Mongabay. “Chinese farmers not only have an opportunity to leave a trade that poses a direct threat to human health — something that can no longer be tolerated in light of COVID — but also to transition to more humane and sustainable livelihoods such as growing plant foods popular in Chinese cuisine.”
“The amount of attention and resolve that the government, media, and society in China have paid to the wildlife consumption issue in the wake of this pandemic is unprecedented,” Steve Blake, China’s chief representative at WildAid, also explained to Mongabay. “There’s not only much improved policy measures resulting from this, but also I think public perceptions on the need to end some of this risky wildlife consumption is going to be long-lasting.”
Species Unite
A collection of stories of those who fight the good fight on behalf of animals.