Malaysian Mosques Offer Guidance on Poaching
In the Malaysian state of Kelantan (called Darul Naim or ‘The Blissful Abode’ in Arabic) which borders Thailand, Friday sermons will contain advice on how to conserve wildlife – both plant and animal, and will talk about the need to prevent lawless acts such as poaching, and illegal logging which forces elephants and tigers out of their natural habitats and into farmed areas where they raid villages for food.
It’s a situation that’s difficult to monitor, and even more difficult to assess – in some places it’s the income produced by illegal logging that is causing the movement of animals which are then shot, either in deliberate poaching activity or as a result of their predation of villages. In other places the trees that are cut down are worthless – they are removed simply to force the animals to vacate the area so that they will be easier targets for poachers who have ready markets for tiger-skins and organs and for ivory.
The illegal wildlife trade is not just a trade in animals, it involves the destruction or alteration of habitats, often to allow development such as tourism or farming. This kind of multi-purpose damage is often a short-term response to poverty which means that preaching alone is not enough.
Poverty causes poaching
Malaysia and Thailand have environmental issues in common, and development issues too. While resort areas and industrial complexes are relatively cash rich, the rural parts of both countries are still low on development indices, lacking primary educational facilities, healthcare facilities and transport infrastructure – and that can mean that conflict arises over natural resources, including animals and plants that have a hard cash value. For many Malays and Thais, the tourist income generated by bringing people to see animals in their natural habitat - what we call eco-tourism - doesn’t trickle down as far and as fast as selling bush-meat, skins and organs for traditional medicines, which generates instant cash-in-hand at the expense of the animal population’s future stability.
Deforestation is accelerating
It’s almost impossible to say how many tigers still live in Malaysia, but it’s estimated that numbers could be as low as 500, a reduction of 2,500 since the 1950s, while only around 1000 elephants still live on the Malaysian peninsula – a massive drop in numbers from the days when every village had a village elephant to move logs, and wild elephant groups travelled through the forests on a regular basis. A major reason for the drop in animal populations is deforestation – which is happening faster than in any other tropical nation according to FAO. Malaysia is estimated to have lost around 140,200 hectares of forest per year since 2000, which is an accelerating rate as its deforestation rate was only 78,500 hectares annually in the 1990s.
Malaysian rainforest courtesy of Luca & Vita at Flickr under a creative commons licence
