Where’s All the Panda Money Going?
US zoos have paid millions to China for the privilege of housing pandas, with the expectation that China invests the money in panda conservation. A New York Times investigation reveals that the funding has been spent on projects unrelated to pandas, while American zookeepers look the other way.
Since the 1970s, with the advent of so-called Panda Diplomacy, zoos in the US and elsewhere have paid handsomely for the rights to house pandas. It costs about a million bucks a year for a panda couple, while China retains ownership of the pandas as well as any resultant offspring. For their part, the Chinese are expected to use the money on conservation in the pandas’ natural habitat – mountain ranges in China’s Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces.
The Times found that the Chinese government has spent millions on other things – apartment buildings, roads, computers, museums – and has refused even to account for millions more. American zookeepers have known that the money was not always going toward conservation, but have kept mum, knowing that China could always revoke the arrangement.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the payments, has been raising concerns about this with both American zoo administrators and Chinese officials. On three occasions, the US froze payments to China over the shoddy record keeping.
But in the end the regulators allowed the money to keep flowing and agreed not to check the spending in China so thoroughly. “There was always pushing back and forth about how the US shouldn’t ask anything,” says Kenneth Stansell, a former Fish and Wildlife official. His Chinese counterparts argued that “it shouldn’t be of any concern to the US government.”
In 2010, the panda program was on the verge of collapse when an agreement, described as a “compromise,” was reached: the USFWS basically stopped asking uncomfortable questions, leaving oversight responsibilities to the zoos. None of this has been disclosed publicly until now.
Zoos in Europe are also in the dark about how their panda rent money is spent in China. Much of the funding goes toward panda related projects – such as a Chengdu breeding center, which has evolved into more of a tourist attraction than a research facility that benefits wild pandas.
Meanwhile American zoos continue to advertise that they are saving a species in the wild, although the wild panda ecosystem in western China is more fragmented than ever – even as “panda tourism” is booming in the region.
The zoos that house pandas are okay with the arrangement – and to be honest it’s good that the captive pandas get a fine, pampered life – but we should be under no illusions about the efforts to preserve or restore wild panda habitats, because there hasn’t been much.
Photo credit: Ocean Park
