Training Environmental Defenders in Vietnam

EJF has just returned from Vietnam, where our team of experts has been providing further training to our Hanoi-based partners ENV (Education for Nature Vietnam).

This is the fourth time EJF has collaborated with ENV, providing expert training in video, helping them to raise awareness and influence public attitudes about the need to protect wildlife threatened by hunting and trade.

Currently an estimated 4000 bears are kept illegally in Vietnam's flourishing bear farms where they are "milked" for their bile, which is used in traditional medicines and tonics. Despite the availability of synthetic alternatives the demand for bear bile continues to increase.

The result has been the introduction of intensive farming of wild bears to supply growing consumer demand. Most of the farmed bears are believed to have been illegally taken from Vietnam's forests, or smuggled over the border from Laos.

Past EJF training programmes provided ENV with basic camera skills and assistance in the production of a 30-second television advert with the leading Vietnamese singer My Linh, urging people not to use products made from bears.

During this training ENV wanted to produce a PSA that would encourage Vietnam’s younger generation to feel confident in saying, “No to Bear Bile”. The resulting 30 second PSA has been produced for Vietnamese television, and will bolster ENV’s increasingly successful campaign against the consumption of bear bile.