Saving Wild Tiger

A century ago, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers living in the wild. Now there are perhaps 3,200 left. The best chance — probably the only remaining chance — to save them from extinction is being worked out during a five-day summit meeting this week in St. Petersburg, Russia, staged by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank. The meeting includes representatives from major conservation groups and all 13 nations with tigers living in the wild, including India, Indonesia, Thailand and Russia.

Two things are needed. The first is a more focused conservation strategy, like the “source site” approach recommended by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The goal is for all the countries with wild tigers to identify and protect sites with enough breeding females and room for an expanding tiger population. The hope is that vigilant protection of these sites could double the tiger population by 2022.

Ending the international trade in tiger parts, which are still believed to have almost magical powers in China and across Asia, will be harder to solve. This isn’t a matter of stopping a few poachers. It means shutting down hard-core traffickers and a high-profit black market. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, is scheduled to attend on Wednesday, the final day of the meeting, which we hope is a good sign. China banned trading in tiger parts in 1993. It must actively discourage the cultural appetite for them and aggressively pursue traffickers.

Unless these efforts succeed, tigers could go extinct in the wild within 20 years. The United States, which sent a senior State Department official to the meeting, has no wild tigers, but it does have well upward of 5,000 tigers living in captivity. The government keeps no track of where they are, who owns them, or what becomes of them, which means they are vulnerable to the black market. It needs to do more to protect these tigers.