Bred for Marketing--Legally : Rare Turtle Is Thriving on Island Farm

Rare turtles from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion are providing faraway French clients with exotic soups, steaks, shoes and belts. And it’s all legal.

Despite being listed as an endangered species under a 16-year-old international treaty, the green turtle is ambitiously marketed by a farm on this French tropical isle with support from the government in Paris.

“Putting an endangered species to commercial use is a way of safeguarding it. If there were more farms like this one, illegal hunting would go out of business,” says Stephane Ciccione, who runs the Corail farm on the west coast of Reunion.

Heavily hunted in the past, the herbivorous Chelonia mydas is now rarely spotted in local waters. But here literally thousands jostle each other in scores of dark water tanks--eating, sleeping and fighting.

Each year female turtles climb laboriously ashore to lay their spherical white eggs on the sandy shores of Europa and Tromelin, two tiny Indian Ocean islands that form part of France’s far-flung overseas network.

Most eggs hatch at night, when baby turtles stand the best chance of escaping marauding predators in their long trek back to the sea.

Acting on the assumption that their daytime siblings are unlikely to survive anyway, Paris allows Ciccione to catch up to 7,000 of these a year and fly them to Reunion to be raised.

At the farm the turtles slowly grow from delicate 2-inch-long babies to adolescents weighing up to 90 pounds. Powerful pumps suck in sea water from the shallow coral lagoon nearby, giving the turtles the warm water they thrive on.

As they grow, staff members eliminate stunted, diseased or excessively dark specimens, favoring instead large turtles with colorful pink, maroon and orange variegated shells.

The meat, recommended by doctors because it is exceptionally low in calories and fat and high in protein, is marketed as turtle steaks and the traditional soup. The fat is turned into suntan oil.

“Seventy-five percent of a turtle’s body can be put to use. There’s very little wastage,” Ciccione says.

In reality, however, actually selling the finished products has proved far from easy.

The 1973 Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) prohibits any international trade in turtles. This means that Corail’s products can only be sold internally to mainland France and French overseas possessions--a limitation that helped drive the company that originally set up the farm into bankruptcy and still means heavy losses for the new owners.

France tried to win permission for the farm to sell abroad in 1987, but CITES signatories turned the proposal down.

“It’s true that the method the farm uses to collect hatchlings is not having any measurable impact on the wild turtle population,” said Richard Luxmoore, research officer at the World Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, England.

“But the problem is that the international trade generated by the farm would make it much more difficult to control illegal hunting. Illegal turtle products would be disguised as ranch products. That’s why the proposal was turned down.”

Confined to a restricted market, Corail’s owners are struggling to win over a wary public.