By the time you read this, Barun Mitra, director of the Delhi-based Liberty Institute, will be done with his lecture at a Washington event organised by US’ Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The subject is interesting: Sell the Tiger to save it.

CEI describes Mitra as “an independent thinktank dedicated to empowering the people by harnessing the power of the market and onewho visited China a few months back as a guest of the government to learn about Chinese efforts at tiger conservation”.

Currently working on expanding his argument for private tiger conservation in a paper to be published by CEI, Mitra has made his case earlier in several Indian and international publications, including The New York Times, and his fundamentals are deceptively simple: “Despite the growing environmental bureaucracy and budgets, and despite the proliferation of conservationists and conferences, the tiger is as close to extinction as it has been since the Project Tiger was launched in 1972. But animals are renewable resources. If you think of tigers as products, it becomes clear that demand provides opportunity.”

With indications that Beijing, under pressure from the strong traditional medicine lobby, is likely to open up tiger trade for its domestic industry, Mitra’s campaign has worried conservationists. A group of experts, including those from WWF-US, have already met in Washington last Friday. Most of them were to attend the lecture by Mitra today and present an opposing view, if permitted. In India, the Ministry of Environment and Forest, sources say, may also issue a disclaimer, disassociating the government’s policies from Mitra’s views. Very few, however, remember that tiger farming was an issue of bilateral cooperation in the first and only tiger protocol between India and China signed in 1995 by then minister Kamal Nath and his Chinese counterpart Song Jian. The protocol holds good - till, and only if, the fresh Indo-China tiger MoU being discussed in recent weeks overwrites it — and India remains a potential partner in tiger farming. But that is another (Kamal Nath’s) story. For now, let us focus on the four key points of Mitra’s theory that challenge the entire paradigm of conservation:

... contd.