The business of bear farming

VnnNews would like to introduce an extraordinary exposé of the lucrative but flagrantly illegal business of ‘bear bile farming’ near Ha Long City published by Tuoi Tre Newspaper recently. 

Bear bile disguised as ginger tea.

Part II: The business of bear farming

Part I:  Infiltrating a Ha Long bear farm 

While investigating the bear bile trade along the road to Ha Long City, we recognized some familiar faces: Korean middlemen. At first we thought they were Vietnamese as they spoke Vietnamese relatively well.

Everything must be done through those middlemen because of an immutable rule in the bile trade at bear farms in Ha Long city: customers never pay the farm staff directly. The middlemen, or brokers, organize and run the bile trading network and earn huge profits from bears.

The big money goes to the middlemen

However, information collected by Tuoi Tre revealsed that some tourists pay as much as $500 to $1,300 for bile. Most tourists buying bile from bear farms chose tin foils packages because it can be hidden easily in their luggage. Some farms took extra caution by branding bile packages as ginger tea

From watching those middlemen at work, and talking to others about them, we became more aware of their role. Their most important task is to undertake marketing, sourcing tourists from Asian countries, mostly Korea, through travel agencies in Hanoi and Ha Long City.

Though they use name cards in transaction with customers, almost none of these lists an address, but only a name, mobile phone number and the telephone and fax number of the bear farm. A few also give an e-mail address). Some middlemen even use two cards with the same phone, fax number and email address but different names.

After nearly two weeks of watching and intruding into bear farms, we realized that most customers visit these farms after completing a boat tour around Ha Long bay. More precisely, the tourists are brought from Ha Noi to Ha Long by travel companies, and on their way back, a visit is arranged to one of the bear farms in Ha Long’s Ha Khau precinct or in Dai Yen village, a few kilometers from the Bai Chay resort area on the highway back to Hanoi.

At these bear farms, we noticed that middlemen normally did not ride the bus with the customer groups. They stay in Bai Chay to pick up tourists and usually travel by cars registered in other provinces. Those who live in Ha Long typically use ‘xe om’ (motorbike taxis). They show up at the bear farms 10-15 minutes prior to the customers’ arrival.

Reception, introduction, marketing and selling bear bile to visitors are all undertaken and executed by these middlemen “brokers.” The farm manager and staff quietly walk beside them, attentive to their requests. The only activities that do not involve the middleman are anaesthetizing the bears, extracting the bile, and bottling and packaging it.

An unspoken agreement: The bear farmers do not receive money directly. They extract bile, bottle it and hand it to customers. Then, based on the amount of bile purchased by each group, the farmers collect money from the middleman. The wholesale price is 20,000 to 30,000 dong per cubic centimeter, not even two US dollars. The farm staff pays no attention to how much money the customers pay to the middleman/broker. In our observation, the middlemen just size up each group to set a price. Commonly, it’s $20 to $30 per cubic centimeter. Customers can pay in cash if they buy small amounts of bile, but most pay by Visa.

At farms with 50 or more bears, bile is collected from each bear once a month, yielding 120-150 cubic centimeters each time. In the peak season, when swarms of visitors approach, a bear may have to “serve the sentence” of a second extraction in the same month. Farms that cannot produce enough bile to meet demand constantly import frozen bile from other places to sell to the visitors.

Sometimes, even though the bear has already been anaesthetized, the visitors are not merciless enough to watch the extraction act. If they refuse to buy bile or only buy a little bit of frozen bile, the middleman is still expected to pay 200,000 dong to the farmer.

We noted down that a bear farm typically earns no less than 200 million dong per month from bile trade, and more than half a billion dong in peak months. However, this amount is nothing compared to the middleman’s profits, typically up to ten times as much. The middlemen invest invest no capital, but only their time in finding customers and marketing the bile to them.

“No one raises bears for tourism”

Equipment to extract bile.

Data provided by the Quang Ninh Forest Protection Department shows there are 15 bear ‘farms’ owned by 22 individuals in the Ha Long City area. The farms hold a total of 320 bears. The seven largest bear farms hold 306 bears, including 79 unregistered bears.

We learned that at bear farms where they organize tours for foreigners, at least two or three bears have their bile extracted per day. One farm even sold to visitors almost 700 cc of bile taken from seven bears in just one day this August. The information we managed to obtain demonstrates that in the peak months after Lunar New Year, when tourists from Korea, Taiwan, China flood into bear farms, no less than 1,000 cc of bile per day is sold at a farm.

Although the bears are listed in Decree No 32/2006/NĐ-CP as rare and endangered species (and thus their exploitation and use for commercial purposes is strictly forbidden), for many years the bear bile trade has flourished at those farms.

In May 2009, meeting with National Assemblyman Nguyen Dinh Xuan, the owner of Dat Viet Farm, Nguyen Thanh Nhuong, revealed that every month it costs him 800,000 dong to feed and take care of one bear, not to mention the initial 30 to 40 million dong spent to buy each bear.

“If you raise bears only for conservation and not for profits, how do you cover those expenses,” Mr.Xuan asked. “Well, it’s hard to answer your question!” Nhuong scratched his head and stammered.

Challenged on his claim that Dat Viet Farm does not extract and sell bear bile to tourists, Nhuong admitted: “It’s not easy to confirm. Could you ask me simpler questions that I can answer? Such tricky questions are giving me a hard time” (!).

In June 2009, after Tuoi Tre reporters sneaked into some farms in the guise of tourists and confirmed that bear bile was being extracted and sold to tourists, we reported to Mr.Tang Xuan Phuong, the deputy director of the Quang Ninh Forestry Protection Department − the authority in direct charge of licensing and controlling local bear farming. Mr.Phuong told us that no one raises bears just for tourists to see. However, he added, local rangers had never caught red-handed any act of bear bile extraction so far.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre 

Tags: Bear Bile, Bear Farm, Bear Farms, Bile Trade, Ha Long City, Into Bear Farms, Long City, The Bear, The Bear Farms, The Bile, The Middleman, The Middlemen, Physics games

PostsComments

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.