Tiger reserves to be formed in Highlands

VnnNews – Five tiger reserves will be established in the Central Highlands and southern provinces under a national programme to preserve and expand the country’s tiger population.

It’s the Year of the Tiger and actions needed to preserve tigers

The development of tiger conservation areas is the first step in the national programme, said Hoang Thanh Nhan, an official from the Biodiversification Conservation Department under the Vietnam Environment Agency (NEA).

The programme, designed by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in co-operation with foreign experts, was in response to the Global Tiger Initiative launched by the World Bank to protect the Asian tiger from extinction by 2020.

The five areas will be established in the Central Highland provinces of Dak Lak, Kon Tum and Dak Nong, the southern province of Binh Phuoc and the central province of Quang Nam.

York Don National Park in Dak Lak will be a key area in the programme and will be developed in close co-ordination between forest protection staff, border police and non-government organisations.

When the reserves in operation, qualified staff and modern facilities will take on the protection, supervision and management work, said Nhan at a national tiger conservation seminar held recently in Hanoi .

The number of wild tigers in Vietnam has dropped sharply over the past few decades and they face extinction within the next ten years, said experts at the seminar.

Although Vietnam is one of the 13 countries in the world to have a wild tiger population, the country now has less than 50 wild tigers that are in serious danger of extinction, due to hunting and deforestation, according to Nguyen The Dong, the NEA’s vice chairman.

In Vietnam, tigers have habitually lived along the border between Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, in the central provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, the Central Highland provinces and the southern province of Binh Phuoc .

However, the tiger population only numbers a handful in many of these areas, with some districts only possessing paper records of tiger numbers backed by little evidence of real tiger populations, he said.

Nguyen Manh Hiep from the NEA’s Nature Conservation Department suggested setting up a dedicated wild-life border patrol because wild tiger populations were not confined to just Vietnam but regularly crossed borders.

Hiep added that another reason for the decline was that Vietnamese and other Asian people hunt tigers for their body parts to manufacture supposed medicines. People also believe that tiger teeth will help them avoid bad luck.

Source: VNA

Tags: In The Central, The Central, Physics games

PostsComments

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.