Wildlife conservation activists in Indonesia marked a somber Global Tiger Day earlier this week with dire warnings about the relentless destruction of the last remaining forests that are home to the critically endangered Sumatran tiger and the growing online trade in tiger parts.
In a press release to mark Global Tiger Day, which fell on Monday, the World Wide Fund for Nature's Indonesian office said that a combination of external factors was driving the apex predator to the inevitable brink of extinction.
Among these is the worst rate of habitat destruction experienced by any of the six extant tiger species worldwide.
"Every year the island of Sumatra loses more than 500,000 hectares of forest to make way for agricultural land," WWF said, noting that this represented a loss of nearly 6 percent a year.
The organization said the massive forest fires that raged throughout much of Riau province in June and made international headlines for the record-breaking haze they caused in Singapore and Malaysia had also destroyed vast swaths of tiger habitat.
"Forty-two percent of the fire hot spots in Riau were inside primary forests that are tiger habitats," it said.
Besides the loss of habitat, another major threat to the continued survival of the species is poaching, with various parts of the animal in high demand in East Asia for use in traditional medicine.
WWF Indonesia cited 2008 data from the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as saying that of the estimated 51 Sumatran tigers killed each year, three-quarters were victims of the illegal wildlife trade.
Anwar Purwoto, WWF Indonesia's program director for forest and freshwater species, said Indonesia was obliged under its commitment as a tiger range country to double the number of Sumatran tigers in the wild by 2022 from 2010 levels, but warned that it was not acting fast enough. There are an estimated 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild.
"Time is ticking away. We're already a quarter of the way toward the deadline. The government must speed up the implementation of its strategy to save the Sumatran tiger population so that it can meet the target," Anwar said.
WWF Indonesia said it was working closely with the government and private organizations to manage key tiger habitats, including through patrols, setting up guard posts and camera traps, and establishing field stations for research, conservation and education purposes.
Sunarto, WWF Indonesia's elephant and tiger conservation coordinator, said there were not enough forest rangers patrolling the tiger habitats against poachers and the illegal loggers destroying their habitats.
He added that WWF Indonesia had consistently urged the Forestry Ministry to get people living in or near the forests involved in sustainable forest management, which would both empower local communities and help protect tiger habitats and populations.
While the threat posed by poachers is not a new phenomenon, activists have sounded the alarm on a relatively recent medium that has boosted demand for tiger parts: online trading.
Iding Haidir, secretary of the Harimau Kita (Our Tigers) forum in Jambi, said buyers from all over the world now had access to Sumatran tiger parts as a result of the flourishing online trade.
"Often the parts are disguised as antique objects or parts from species that aren't endangered," he said as quoted by Antaranews.com, adding that many popular Indonesian e-commerce websites were known to tolerate or overlook users buying and selling protected wildlife.
Iding said that in 2011 and 2012, wildlife authorities seized from online traders tiger pelts, claws, teeth, whiskers and even whole stuffed animals believed to have come from at least 22 poached tigers.
He said the advent of e-commerce had allowed transnational syndicates to spring up, collecting tiger parts from poachers all over Sumatra and selling them to buyers in Indonesia and abroad.
"There needs to be more seriousness and cooperation between countries [to address the problem], because the illegal wildlife trade is no longer just between towns or provinces. It's international," Iding said.
He added that Harimau Kita was working with the popular online forum Kaskus and e-commerce site Berniaga.com to crack down on users trading in tiger parts.
Siska Handayani, the North Sumatra and Aceh coordinator of the organization Tiger Heart, agreed that the Internet had allowed the illegal wildlife trade to reach unprecedented levels.
"The seller and buyer can carry out a transaction in an instant and the goods are sent by courier, without either of them ever meeting in person," she said in Medan as quoted by Antaranews.com.
"Almost every part of the tiger's body is a sought-after item on the black market, which is why the number being poached continues to increase."
Agus S.B. Sutito, the head of the Forestry Ministry's sub-directorate of species conservation, acknowledged that the Sumatran tiger faced threats to its survival on several fronts.
He said the ministry had estimated the financial cost to the country from the illegal trade in all wild animal species at Rp 9 trillion ($875 million) a year.