IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Wingard, J.R.; Zahler, P. | |
| Mongolia - Silent steppe: the illegal wildlife trade crisis | |
| 2006 Full Book | |
Although never a part of the Soviet Union, Mongolia's long status as a satellite state guaranteed that it would suffer from the collapse of that world power. Along with many other countries, and seemingly overnight, Mongolia was cut adrift from the government that had dominated its political and economic life for almost 70 years. Mongolia was understandably unprepared to negotiate the forced transition which happened when its level of development was substantial compared to what it was in the 1920s, but it was still very much a dependent nation, living in large part off Soviet subsidies. Investment in the country by its former mentor had given Mongolia a well-regulated capacity to harvest, but little ability to produce or add value to its resources; and wildlife trade was always a part of what it supplied. From 1926 to 1985, Mongolia delivered to its northern neighbor a total of 119 million furs, 13 million kilograms of game meat, and 1.5 million tons of elk antlers, trading as many as 3.5 million animals in a single year. Recently, the opening of borders with China, with its dominant economy and enormous capacity to absorb resources, has resulted in a shift in trade routes but a rapid re-escalation in wildlife trade, with concomitant declines in economically important wildlife species. Five examples highlight the recent, rapid decline in economically important species in Mongolia. Within five years, the population of Mongolia's subspecies of saiga antelope (_Saiga tatarica mongolicus_) catastrophically declined from over 5,000 to " less than 800, an 85 percent drop (WWF 2004). The decline in Mongolia follows shortly after a similar collapse in the major populations of saiga in Kazakhstan and Russia, where populations have crashed from over 1 million in the early 1990s to perhaps as low as 31,000 in recent years; the driver in this collapse is the lucrative Chinese medicinal market for saiga horn (Millner-Gulland et al. 2001, Flora and Fauna International 2004). Red deer (Cervus elaphus) have also declined catastrophically across Mongolia. According to a 1986 government assessment, the population size at that time was approximately 130,000 deer inhabiting 115,000 square km. The most recent population assessment in 2004 showed that only about 8,000 to 10,000 red deer now inhabit 15 aimags (provinces) of Mongolia. This is a 92 percent decline in only 18 years. Government fi gures estimated 50,000 argali (_Ovis ammon_) in Mongolia in 1975, but only 13,000 to 15,000 in 2001 (Amgalanbaatar et al. 2002). This is a 75 percent decline in just 16 years. Marmot (_Marmota sibirica_) once numbered more than 40 million, dropping to around 20 million by 1990 and were last tallied in 2002 at around 5 million; a decline of 75 percent in only 12 years (Batbold 2002). Finally, saker falcons (_Falco cherrug_) have started a similarly precipitous decline, dropping from an estimated 3,000 breeding pairs in 1999 to 2,200 pairs, losing 30 percent of the population in just 5 years (Shagdarsuren 2001). |
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