Tesoros de Colombia Sustainable Farm

Colombia as a world biodiversity power that still has a big debt toward supporting the Biocommerce or Biotrade as a sustainable tool. Wildlife farming is still underdeveloped mainly because the lack of understanding and support from the environmental authority’s system of the country. The specific regulations (Environmental license) required for stablishing such a project is the same as high impact industry or project like mining or oil production.

Also, the regional environmental authorities that control these activities are not supportive even as they get the benefits of a private party doing part of their job: to promote and protect wildlife populations using expert captive breeding. In the case of Tesoros, it took almost ten years to get the full licensing while the time expected in the regulations was a maximum of 3 1/2 years. The consequences of this delay almost put an end to the project several times for the impossibility of funding it by other means of getting expensive loans.

Meanwhile, thousands of frogs were smuggled out of Colombia each year through international airports where some were confiscated. At the Bogota international airport in 1998 more than 600 arlequin poison frogs and 300 lehmann’s poison frogs were confiscated and more recently in 2018 and 2019, more than 450 arlequin and 200 lehmann poison frogs respectively were confiscated.

This situation clearly has a consequence on theses frog’s population declination. In 2020 a scientific article published by Betancourth-Cundar et al, suggested that more than 80,000 of these frogs were illegally extracted from their only natural habitat in Colombia in the last four decades. According with the experts, no more than 5000 adults of these species remain in the wild so this overexploitation clearly is driving this species close to extinction.

Tesoros de Colombia was the first project to breed permanently these species in captivity in the world thanks to developing succesful husbandry protocols.