COLUMN ONE : Raiding Russia’s Natural Wonders : Foreigners are smuggling endangered species out of the country’s remote Far East. Corruption and neglect abet trade in exotica, aphrodisiacs.

Their backpacks and suitcases are stuffed with eye-catching exotica: tiger bones, slimy sea cucumbers, jumbles of ginseng roots and gallbladders culled from Siberian brown bears and dried to the consistency of beef jerky.

Yet few of the “seasonal laborers” returning home to China and North Korea ever encounter official hindrance as they spirit out personal fortunes plundered from the Russian Far East’s natural treasure-trove.

Russian border guards and customs agents earning less than $100 a month are ready accomplices to the poachers and smugglers roaming one of the world’s last frontiers for unfettered trapping and trading of endangered species.

Indifference to wildlife protection is evident everywhere in eastern Russia, a land used in the Soviet era for military ports and prison camps. Protected for decades by the dictatorship that locked it away from prying eyes and poachers, the rugged coastline and sparsely inhabited taiga are now suffering a veritable open season.

Purloined ginseng sought for longevity potions and pulverized reindeer antlers needed for aphrodisiac powders are arrayed on sales tables next to home-cured bacon and pirated videos.

Harvested to virtual extinction elsewhere in Asian waters, the dwindling population of trepang sea cucumbers is ostensibly protected by Russian conservation laws forbidding its catch, sale or consumption. Yet the delicacy relished by gourmets in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong can be found on the menus of new eateries catering to the foreign community here, exposing the broad disregard for resource protection that plagues this region.

At the elegant Versailles restaurant in Vladivostok, the sea cucumber listed in Russia’s ever-lengthening “Red Book” of endangered species is served stuffed with cheese and fried.

The opening of Russia’s borders after the fall of communism four years ago ushered in a new era of travel freedom and international integration. But it has also subjected the diverse and delicate ecosystem of the Far East to the rapacious capitalist dynamic of supply and demand.

Through the porous, poorly patrolled borders, armies of contraband dealers have arrived in search of medicinal plants that have been plucked out of existence elsewhere in Asia, aphrodisiac elements off-limits in their own countries and creatures of the wilderness and sea whose harvesting is more carefully controlled at home.

Environmentalists complain that after 70 years of blissful isolation, the Russian Far East--the vast and remote territory that sweeps east of Siberia to the Pacific and from North Korea to the Arctic Circle--has become the world’s marketplace for the banned and the bizarre.

Foreign scavengers of odd ingredients for traditional medicines and kinky concoctions cross into Russia with easily obtained tourist visas or on temporary work permits, posing as cut-rate construction workers at the ubiquitous building sites of the Primorsky region, which spans the country’s lower Pacific coast.

Poor Wages at Home

While in the Far East earning skimpy wages at their day jobs, the laborers buy up, then smuggle out, contraband that is highly marketable outside Russia.

“Moscow gives us very little authority to control this situation,” complains Valery A. Shafranovsky, deputy chief of the government Committee on Natural Resources for the Primorsky region.

“Customs and border-crossing formalities are federal responsibilities, but no one in these services shows much regard for protection of our resources.”

While people in more developed countries have had success in the treatment and preservation of rare species, impoverished Russians are wholly uncomprehending of the need to protect their unique natural surroundings.

When a border guard or customs agent discovers banned goods in a departing visitor’s luggage, it is more often regarded as an income-earning opportunity than as cause for arrest and confiscation.

“These are professionals we’re dealing with, those doing the poaching and controlling the illegal sales,” says Shafranovsky, a biologist by training. “They are prepared to pay huge sums for these items--way beyond what the government can afford to pay those responsible for environmental protection.”

Collectors have been known to pay as much as $100,000 for the intact skin of nearly extinct Ussuri tigers--a sum most Russians could not earn in a lifetime of legal employment.

Tiger bones are also highly marketable for use in aphrodisiacs, as are the desiccated bear gallbladders and ground antlers.

The Primorsky region, wedged between the Pacific Ocean, North Korea and northeast China, is most popular as a target for poachers of wild ginseng. Russia’s taiga, the undulating forest land that stretches east of the Ural Mountains, hosts Asia’s last pristine ranges of the root, believed to enhance longevity when eaten or brewed as tea.

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“Since the border with China opened, there is at least three times as much wild ginseng taken from our forests illegally than during the approved harvest,” says Yuri N. Zhuravlev, director of the Far East Institute of Biology and Soil Science.

One positive consequence of Communist-imposed isolation was that eastern Russia’s natural wealth was protected by the impenetrable barriers imposed to foreign foragers.

While Chinese neighbors harvested wild ginseng into extinction, Russians ignored the roots, allowing them to flourish.

China’s exhausted fields are now planted with cultivated ginseng. But Zhuravlev says Russia’s wild root is more potent and, therefore, highly attractive to the legions of would-be traders just a few hours’ drive across the border.

The wide-open spaces of the Russian Far East make effective patrolling virtually impossible, the scientist says. And with market prices at about $1,500 for a four-ounce ginseng root, poachers can afford to pay their way out of interception.

Georgy B. Yelyakov, chairman of the Far Eastern branch of Russia’s prestigious Academy of Sciences, blames this remote region’s profound failure to protect endangered species on its 6,000-mile distance from the political power center in Moscow and on the leftovers of inept Soviet-era environmental policies that place conservation under the same government ministries in charge of resource exploitation.

“The Forestry Protection Service is part of the Forestries Ministry, whose performance is measured by the amount of timber it harvests,” Yelyakov notes disapprovingly. “It’s the same with the Fisheries Ministry. It is supposed to set the limits and at the same time to maximize the catch.”

Those conflicting pressures inevitably tip the balance in favor of economics over environment, he says.

“Reindeer antlers are very valuable. A small piece can sell for $800 in Hong Kong,” Yelyakov says. “Each region is authorized to sell a certain quantity, but the problem is that these limits are only on paper. There is no reliable means of enforcement.”

Dire Circumstances

Further undermining vague and contradictory legislation are the generally dire circumstances in which those scraping along in the Far East find themselves.

Barely 5 million people live widely scattered in the vast territory that spans 6,000 miles of Pacific coastline, anchored by this regional capital of 700,000.

With the traditional livelihoods of fishing, mining and defense industries all in decline, unemployment is chasing away hundreds of thousands each year, and those who stay tend to view the land and its bounty as their means of survival.

Contraband dealers find no shortage of locals familiar with the Far East plenty and willing to provide the middlemen with the commodities they seek to smuggle.

“The profits are so high and enforcement levels so low, the pillage is phenomenal,” complains Misha Jones, a community development specialist with the Sausalito-based Pacific Environment and Resources Center.

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“Foreign buyers come in and provide opportunities for local hunters to sell bear gallbladders and tiger skins for staggering prices,” says Jones, who has spent 18 months working with indigenous peoples, showing them how to live off their natural resources without exhausting them. “And how do you convince a guy who can’t feed his family of the benefits of preserving biodiversity? To get pro-action from people who don’t get their wages for months, who have seen their whole social system totally inundated--it’s impossible!”

But environmental action groups such as his and the World Wildlife Fund have burrowed into the Far East wilderness intent on instilling a respect for nature that was all but eradicated during the Communist era, when humans’ conquest of their surroundings was celebrated as progress.

The eco-volunteers have been organizing Western grant money to fund anti-poaching brigades to protect bears and tigers and to lobby against what they see as the pernicious efforts of foreign timber and mining interests to invade the Far East in the absence of effective environmental protection laws.

They fear stepped-up logging and gold mining will destroy the habitat of small animals unique to the region and sully rivers that serve as spawning beds for returning salmon.

Although legislation in Russia remains ineffective, international agreements banning trade of rare and endangered species have empowered enforcement agencies along the circuitous Pacific trade routes to intercept wildlife contraband when it is detected.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in September seized a shipment of dehydrated Siberian brown bear gallbladders passing through Anchorage International Airport. It was probably only a fraction of the proscribed aphrodisiac ingredients emanating from Russia, but it was an emotional boost for the champions of conservation.

“Environmental responsibility doesn’t happen overnight,” concedes Jones, who has been working with the indigenous Udege people in the pristine Bikin watershed to develop alternative livelihoods to the trapping of brown bears and dwindling populations of fur-bearing animals. “Look at the damage that was inflicted on wildlife in the American West before anyone became sensitized to the concept of extinction.”

Raiding Russia’s Natural Treasures

Poachers are plundering the natural resources of Russia’s rugged Far East, a region that had been better protected during the Soviet regime.