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Perhaps very few people knew or were aware of the true scale of the wildlife farming industry before the Covid-19 pandemic erupted in China and spread worldwide. This is because, until then, licensing in China was primarily handled by provincial and local forestry agencies, so information about these activities was not fully disclosed.
The Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, believed to be the origin of Covid-19, has been closed.
In late December, the novel coronavirus disease, officially named Covid-19, broke out in China. Scientists began searching for the virus's host and confirmed that it originated from wild animals such as bats and snakes. In late January 2020, the Chinese government issued a temporary ban on the wildlife trade to limit the spread of the virus and began enforcing the closure of wildlife farms in early February.
The central legislature has been rushing to revise the Wildlife Protection Law and may restructure regulations on the use of wild animals as food or ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine.
On February 24th, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China officially issued new measures to restrict wildlife trade, banning the consumption of bushmeat and the sale of wild animals for meat at animal markets, effective until the Wildlife Protection Law is amended and passed.
However, this unique market couldn't have emerged and flourished so naturally. For many years, the Chinese government has promoted the idea of domesticating and raising wild animals, arguing that it's an important part of rural development, ecotourism, and poverty alleviation for farmers in remote areas. Just weeks before the Covid-19 outbreak, the Chinese Forestry Administration was still actively encouraging people to raise wild animals and managing these facilities to ensure they operated in accordance with regulations.
However, Xinhua News Agency reported on February 17th that between 2005 and 2015, China's forestry authorities only issued 3,725 national-level wildlife breeding permits – while the actual number was nearly 20,000 wildlife breeding farms nationwide. Of these, the most prominent were 4,600 facilities in Jilin Province, a region renowned for its traditional Chinese medicine practices.
Besides the difficulty in controlling their numbers, there is also very little information available on the list of wild animals bred and kept in farms in China. The most common species known are: civets, sika deer, foxes, peacocks, wild geese, and pheasants…
Markets specializing in the trade of wild animal meat in China.
And the question that is currently concerning animal researchers is: Will...recent ban on wildlife tradeDoes this include the culling of animals in both legal and illegal breeding farms? And if so, how will the enormous compensation costs be handled?
Besides using parts of wild animals as ingredients in traditional medicine, the majority of the wildlife trade is for meat consumption. This trade takes place on online platforms or at animal markets – such as the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the suspected epicenter of the outbreak.
A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering estimated the wildlife farming industry to be worth 56 billion yuan (approximately $8 billion), five times larger than ten years earlier. Meanwhile, the wildlife trade and consumption market was worth 520 billion yuan (approximately $74 billion) and employed more than 14 million people.
More than half of the industry's workforce—approximately 7.6 million people—works in the fur and leather industry, worth around 390 billion yuan. Around 6.2 million people work on farms raising or processing animals for food. In some impoverished regions of China, such as Guizhou and Guangxi, raising wild animals is a vital source of income for residents. Therefore, many environmental and livelihood experts in China are advocating to the government for a transformation of the livestock industry and the provision of new livelihoods for the people.
