Depending on one’s point of view, Guangzhou’s huge Qingping market offers either one of China’s largest selections of natural healing ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine or a vast array of desiccated and dismembered animal carcasses hawked by little better than snake oil salesmen, some of whom actually sell snake-based remedies.
Then there are the plastic sacks stuffed with manta ray gill plates: feathery filaments of cartilage that the rays — majestic cousins of the shark — use to filter plankton from seawater as they swim.
Retailers claim the gills are a time-tested panacea for modern ills, that they can increase the amount of breast milk, detoxify the blood, cure chickenpox, heal tonsillitis and clear a smoker’s lungs.
“I’m not sure how it works, but if you’re sick, eat some in a soup and you’ll immediately feel better,” said Ji Songcheng, 25, whose large shop was jammed recently with bags of black and beige manta gills priced about US$75 for 0.45kg.
However, a rapid decline in the world’s manta populations means that the gills may soon be going off the market. A save-the-mantas campaign appears to be nudging China toward a ban on the gill trade.
It would be a rare success in an otherwise grim litany of ecological ruination tied to the country’s demand for threatened plants and animals.
In part by cultivating support from the government, which is typically loath to take the lead in conservation efforts, the campaign has built up grassroots and official backing for ending gill sales with a sobering message: The business is not just endangering a vulnerable species, it is also harming consumers.
Conservationists say the Chinese trade in manta ray gills has soared during the past decade, fueled not by a renaissance of tradition, but by an unscrupulous network of traffickers looking for ever new ways to profit from the Chinese appetite for wildlife.
The world’s manta populations have dwindled as their gills have piled up in Guangzhou, home to 99 percent of the trade, according to WildAid, a conservation group based in San Francisco that rolled out the current campaign in 2014.
The group, which uses the tagline “When the Buying Stops, the Killing Can, Too,” led two similar efforts that succeeded in reducing demand for both shark fin soup and elephant ivory.
The campaigns employ tactics like having celebrities explain the direct link between consumption of a coveted natural ingredient and the calamitous effect on endangered wildlife, a concept for the most part unknown before in China.
Exactly how a fringe local superstition transformed over a few years into a nationwide industry whose value WildAid puts at US$30 million is obscured by the shadowy nature of the trade.
However, researchers say the market has stemmed mostly from a decline in the availability of large shark fins, which led wildlife traffickers to look for new revenue sources across Asia and beyond. They found it in gill plates, a product so lucrative that sales more than doubled between 2010 and 2013, according to a WildAid report.
As a result, overfishing has wreaked havoc on not only the world’s manta populations but also the US$140 million tourism industry that depends on them. In some areas of Indonesia, the number of caught mantas declined by as much as 94 percent in about a decade, prompting the government to begin arresting fishermen in 2014 and to prohibit all manta fishing in the country’s exclusive economic zone.
That same year, manta rays were given enhanced protections under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The protections require certificates proving that the mantas have been caught and imported legally.
“If you have a permit and a boat, you can go and fish them,” said Meng Xianlin (孟憲林), the director general of China’s endangered species trade authority. “Then you can come back and sell them.”
The problem is that China’s legal trade is driving illegal trafficking.
The Li Sheng Ji Fins, Fish Maw and Seafood Shop in Guangzhou also sells manta ray gills on the Taobao e-commerce site. All the gills come from Indonesia, despite the ban there, said the shop owner, who would give only his last name, Li.
“In China, manta ray is not listed as the first, second or third level of endangered species,” he said. “So you don’t need to worry about being arrested after buying gills from me.”
Still, conservationists, citing close collaboration with the Chinese authorities, say they are hopeful that the trade will soon end.
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