The UN body regulating wildlife commerce rebuked China for large-scale tiger farming Wednesday and cautioned Beijing not to lift a domestic ban on the trade in products made from tiger parts.
"Tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivatives," said a resolution passed by the 171-nation Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
China said earlier that it was evaluating petitions from domestic businesses to lift a 1993 ban on the domestic trade in tiger by-products, especially medicinal tonics.
"If we can provide tiger bones from captive breeding facilities in designated hospitals ... the underground market will shrink dramatically," Wang Weisheng, the head of China's wildlife management services, told journalists.
Wang also said the money raised from the sale of tiger bones could be used in wildlife programs.
Most conservationists say that re-opening the markets in tiger products would seal the animal's fate.
"If China lifts the ban, it will be the end of tigers," said Sue Lieberman, head of the World Wildlife Fund's global species programme.
Legalized trade would encourage poaching of animals in the wild, even in neighbouring countries, and make it possible to launder furs and valuable body parts through authorized domestic businesses, she said.
There are probably less than 25 wild tigers left in China, and only a couple of thousand in their native habitat worldwide.
The resolution questioned the practice of operating huge tiger farms.
Countries that permit tiger breeding "on a commercial scale," said the resolution, should "restrict the captive population to a level supportive only to conserving wild tigers."
While not singled out, China is the only country in the world to allow mass breeding of tigers, with 5,000 of the big cats housed in huge farms in the northeast and southwest.
The language is significant, say conservationists, because it removes any possible scientific justification for maintaining large populations of genetically-compromised tigers that cannot be released into the wild.
"The managed, coordinated zoo population of tigers in the world is in the hundreds, which is enough to maintain genetic diversity," said Kristin Nowell, an expert on illegal tiger trade at wildlife monitoring network TRAFFIC, one of dozens of conservation and wildlife groups sharply critical of the farms.
CITES has classified all Asian big cats as threatened with extinction, and has banned cross-border trade in live animals or products made from their body parts.
But it has no authority to forbid domestic commerce in threatened wildlife within a single country.
A motion by Beijing to insert the word "international" ahead of the phrase condemning "trade in (tiger) parts" -- which would have exempted tiger-bone byproducts produced and sold within China -- was slapped down in a vote Wednesday.
The CITES resolution is not binding, but puts pressure on China to keep its domestic ban in place.
"I think it will be difficult now for China to make the wrong decision," said Lieberman, who said that China "expressed disappointment" after the measure passed.
China has also suggested that the tiger farms could "provide an abundant breeding stock for the future re-introduction and restoration of the wild tiger populations in China," according to a document distributed at CITES.
Conservationists, however, say the mass-bred tigers would not survive in the wild and are genetically compromised due to intensive inbreeding.
