ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Alligators Bag Population Recovery Prize

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 20 1996 (IPS) - Alligators in the swamplands of western Brazil, threatened with extinction 10 years ago, now are so plentiful there is a risk of overpopulation.

The environmental reversal is due to successful breeding experiments by Brazilian livestock farmers in the Mato Grosso Pantanal – the world’s largest natural alligator nursery. But the Agricultural Agricultural Research Centre warns that because illegal Illegal hunting of the creatures for their hides has practically disappeared there is the risk of too many alligators.

The lucrative clandestine trade was stamped out over the last five years by a combination of political action, import restrictions in client nations and competition from the breeders.

The skin of the farm-raised animals is of far better quality than their free-born cousins’, and the market for the crocodile contrabanders has swiftly disappeared.

Hunters were estimated to have killed more than one million alligators every year during the 1990’s and since, they eased operations, the species ‘caiman cocrodilus yacare’ has gone into such a cycle of reproduction, that a super-population is predicted in the Pantanal.

Marco Kloster, leader of the Cooperative of Yacare Breeders of the Pantanal, based in Caceres in the north of the region, however, is confident there is no such risk.

“The ecosystem itself will take charge of rebalancing everything,” he said. There is only a limited amount of food there, and if there are too many mouths to feed the population will reduce.

The Cooperative, created in 1991, includes 23 land owners and is presently confronting the problem of an inability to sell its product on the international market – toward which the project is aimed.

Restrictive legislation and an agreement with Brazil ban the sales of Pantanal yacare skins in the United States, Kloster told IPS, and Europe also closed its market following pressure from environmentalists.

It is now difficult to convince the public the use of crocodile skin will not mean the extinction of the species, but rather, the survival of a new form of livestock raising which in fact guarantees the survival of species.

“Our situation would improve” if the United States would lift its import ban on the skins, said Kloster.

The Brazilian breeders also face the competition of Venezuela and Colombia, who export the same product. Colombia has a well- established farming strategy, said Kloster.

The farming system, with veterinary control and good feeding, has increased productivity, he added, for while 90 percent of the eggs are lost in the wild, the same goes for only 10 percent in captivity. The alligators reach a suitable size for skinning within two years, and these hides are worth 250 – 300 dollars on the international market.

The difficulties in the foreign market have depressed prices, and the farmers have tried to deal with this by encouraging the local market to grow.

Even the possibility of selling alligator meat to restaurants as a luxury food has been looked into, but at an upper limit of 1.5 to three kgs of good meat per animal means this would not be a profitable solution.

Meanwhile, Rubens de Freitas, a traditional coffee grower and livestock raiser of Itirapuan, Sao Paulo State, remains unconcerned. For the last three years, he has been raising the endangered local species of yellow jowled alligator (caiman latirostes), and looks on the job as “entertainment.”

He said his hobby made an excellent alternative for the integrated management of the estate, as the alligators eat beef and offal produced there, and fish from the lake. He has been given “excellent proposals” from various groups, including some chinese entrepreneurs, who are interested in the rare skins.

de Freitas is now working on building up his stocks from an initial 13 animals taken from near extinction in the wild.

All of these farms now need authorisation from the Brazilian Environment Institute which imposes the condition that 10 to 15 percent of the hatchlings must be returned to the wild, thus the natural stocks are not only protected but actively boosted by the farms.