15 May 2009
- Nongkhai/Bangkok, Thailand —The Thai Navy
has seized two Tiger carcasses and 45 pangolins,
and arrested eight traffickers who had planned
to smuggle the animals across the Mekong
River into Lao PDF.
Navy officers followed
two cars carrying the traffickers in Ponpang
village in the Rattana Wapi district of
Nongkai Province on April 26, and made the
arrests as they were attempting to transfer
the slaughtered Tigers and live pangolins
to a boat.
Eight people were arrested
including a Vietnamese woman and her Thai
husband. Several others in the boat fled
upon sighting the navy officers.
The two Tiger carcasses,
chopped in half, and the 45 pangolins, two
of which were dead, were found inside the
two cars.
The navy and Natural
Resources and Environmental Crime Suppression
Division have sent the tiger carcasses to
the Department of National Parks for DNA
testing.
“TRAFFIC lauds the Thai
authorities for carrying out these DNA tests.
Determining the origin of these Tigers is
crucial if authorities hope to end this
tragic trade,” said TRAFFIC Southeast Asia’s
Acting Director Chris R. Shepherd.
This seizure is not
the first case involving Tigers being smuggled
across this border.
In January 2008, the
Thai Navy thwarted an attempt to smuggle
six slaughtered Tigers, five Leopards and
275 live pangolins across the Thai-Laos
border.
In that incident, the
Tigers had also been found sliced in half,
while the Leopards had had their organs
removed.
News reports quoted
authorities saying that at least six people
escaped into the forest while others on
a waiting boat fled into Lao carrying four
sacks believed to contain more animal remains.
This January, Thai police
seized four Tiger carcasses in the resort
town of Hua Hin.
The dead Tigers, weighing
about 250 kg had been decapitated and were
found in a truck passing through Hua Hin
in the Prachuap Kiri Khan province.
Police said the dead
Tigers were believed to have come from Malaysia
and were being transported to China.
A Thai daily, Bangkok
Post, also reported that genetic testing
would be conducted on the Tiger carcasses
at Kasetsart University to see if they were
domesticated or wild animals.
The following month,
Thai authorities discovered the butchered
carcasses of two Tigers and a panther when
they stopped a truck in the southern province
of Pattani.
The driver of the vehicle
was arrested and charged with illegal possession
of the carcasses of endangered wildlife.
He told authorities
he was hired to drive from Sungai Golok,
a town on the Malaysian border to Hat Yai
in Thailand. Reports said the carcasses
were also sent for DNA testing to determine
the subspecies and hence the origin of the
animals.
TRAFFIC also encouraged
governments throughout Southeast Asia to
work together to tackle the problem.
“The trail of butchered
Tigers winds through many countries in Southeast
Asia.
“Tracking down those
who illegally kill and trade these Tigers
and putting them behind bars is a task countries
cannot accomplish their own,” said Shepherd.
+ More
WWF to grade palm oil
buyers
12 May 2009 - Gland,
Switzerland – Only one percent of the sustainable
palm oil available on the market has been
bought, according to new figures released
by the WWF today.
In a bid to speed up
this “sluggish performance”, WWF will assess
the world’s major users of palm oil over
the next six months and publish a Palm Oil
Buyer’s Scorecard highlighting companies
that support sustainable palm oil and exposing
those who have not fulfilled their commitments
to buy it.
WWF helped set up the
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)
as an international body for the industry
to develop sustainability standards. Certified
Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) has been available
since November 2008 and provides assurance
that valuable tropical forests have not
been cleared and that environmental and
social safeguards have been met during the
production of palm oil. Yet further production
will hinge on manufacturers and retailers
committing to buy what’s available.
“So far around 1.3 million
tonnes of certified sustainable palm oil
has been produced by RSPO member plantation
companies, but less than 15,000 tonnes have
been sold,” said Rodney Taylor, Director
of WWF International’s Forests Programme.
“This sluggish demand from palm oil buyers,
such as supermarkets, food and cosmetic
manufacturers, could undermine the success
of the RSPO and threatens the remaining
natural tropical forests of Southeast Asia,
as well as other forests where oil palm
is set to expand, such as the Amazon.”
WWF asks all companies
buying palm oil to make public commitments
that they will use 100 percent certified
sustainable palm oil by 2015; to make public
their plans with deadlines to achieve this
goal; and to begin purchasing certified
sustainable palm oil immediately.
The Palm Oil Buyer’s
Scorecard will rank the commitments and
actions of major global retailers, manufacturers
and traders that buy palm oil. Companies
will be scored on a variety of criteria
relating to their commitments to, and actions
on, sustainable palm oil. The resulting
scores will not only help consumers evaluate
the performance of these companies but will
also encourage the companies themselves
to better support the use of sustainable
palm oil.
As a founding member
of the RSPO, WWF has worked since 2002 with
the palm oil industry to ensure that the
RSPO standards contain robust social and
environmental criteria, including a prohibition
on the conversion of valuable forests. The
RSPO brings together oil palm growers, oil
processors, food companies, retailers, NGOs
and investors to help ensure that no rainforest
areas are sacrificed for new palm oil plantations,
that all plantations minimize their environmental
impacts and that basic rights of local peoples
and plantation workers are fully respected.
The RSPO began in 2002
as an informal cooperation on production
and usage of sustainable palm oil among
Aarhus United UK Ltd, Golden Hope Plantations
Berhad, Migros, Malaysian Palm Oil Association,
Sainsbury’s and Unilever together with WWF.
These organizations held the first Roundtable
meeting in August 2003 in Kuala Lumpur in
order to prepare the foundation for the
organizational and governance structure
that resulted in the formation of the RSPO.
Since then the RSPO has grown to include
more than 300 members between them accounting
for more than 35% of global palm oil production.
