Counsel for Getting There - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 157

there were no biological investigations prior to World War II. Since then,
decades of civil unrest, political instability, and military conflict have
largely prevented fieldwork. Nevertheless, turtles and tortoises face con-
tinuing exploitation for food and medicinal markets in Laos, Cambodia,
and Vietnam, where hunters in rural villages capture them for local con-
sumption or to sell to traders who periodically visit villages to purchase
wildlife.
Although turtles are eaten locally and traded in Laos, Cambodia, and
Vietnam, most are exported through Vietnam to markets in southern
China to appease the extreme demand for the turtles' meat in soup and
their shells for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Consequently, there
are over one thousand large, commercial turtle farms in China that are
collectively worth over a billion U.S. dollars. 2 The scale of these lucrative
operations, especially those involving endangered species, poses a major
threat to the survival of China's diverse turtle fauna. 3 This threat stems
largely from the fact that turtle farmers are the primary purchasers of
wild-caught turtles. They buy them to increase their overall stock of
adult animals and to secure wild breeders. Wild breeders are important,
because successive generations of farm-raised turtles exhibit a marked
decrease in reproductive capability. The reliance on individuals cap-
tured in the wild demonstrates that turtle farming is not a sustainable
practice. As populations of wild turtles decline, it will become increas-
ingly difficult to supplement farm stock from the wild.
Even if turtle farming should crash, the depleted wild populations
will still face overexploitation because there is an entrenched, cultural
demand for wild-caught meat. The nutritional properties of wild ani-
mals are promulgated by the practitioners of traditional Chinese medi-
cine and are thus deeply ingrained in the national psyche. Consequently,
wild-caught turtles fetch significantly higher prices than those raised on
farms, and no amount of captive breeding will decrease the insistence on
obtaining wild turtles for consumption. Salmon and salmon farming in
the United States present parallel situations to the Chinese turtle farms.
Historical Generalizations from These Examples
China is industrializing rapidly, and the escalation of turtle farming has fol-
lowed the path of other capitalist ventures since the economic reforms of
the 1980s. The fusion of China's growth with the utilitarian attitude of the
Chinese toward nature clearly emphasizes the aforementioned fear of los-
ing short-term profits, even at the cost of rendering long-term biodiversity
unsustainable—as the history of economics has so often demonstrated. In
the case of Chinese turtles, the farmers are grabbing the last vestiges of wild
populations to process for the soup pot.
In effect, the tragic and often-repeated pattern is familiar. They are opt-
ing to earn profits as long as they can, regardless of the ecological outcome.
In the long-term, therefore, the economic efforts serve a single function—
to generate profit for a few entrepreneurs, despite the social-environmental
consequences for all generations. 4