On April 30, 106 tonnes of ivory was set ablaze in Nairobi National Park. This ivory represented around 6 700 dead elephants and 450 dead rhinos with a street value estimated at $150–million. (Mara Elephant Project)
Bringing the global shark fin trade under regulation, protecting little-known sea cucumbers from exploding demand for their meat and clamping down on the illegal trade in hippos being killed for their teeth.
These are some of the proposals on the table at the 19th Conference of the Parties (CoP19) to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) which takes place from the 14th of November to the 25th.
For the next two weeks, more than 2 000 experts are meeting in Panama to debate 52 proposals that will affect the regulations on international trade for more than 600 species.
Cites is an international agreement that aims to ensure that international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten the survival of the species. It regulates trade in nearly 40 000 species across the world.
What is Cites?
It operates by placing controls on international trade in animals and plants – and their parts and derivatives – that are listed in its three appendices, ranked according to the degree of protection they require:
Appendix 1
Species at risk of extinction – trade is allowed only under exceptional circumstances.
Appendix II
Species not necessarily threatened with extinction, but for which trade might affect their survival.
Appendix III
Species protected in at least one country, which has requested other Cites parties for help in controlling trade.
Species to watch out for
According to the African Wildlife Economy Institute at Stellenbosch University, “once again some of Africa’s megafauna top the agenda with proposals on the trade in hippo, rhino and elephant products.
“There are also a number of other African species on the agenda, including a helmeted gecko that lives on the coast of western North Africa, guitarfishes found in shallow waters around the continent, and seven species of wild African mahogany found across sub-Saharan Africa.”
Contentious proposals
Zimbabwe is proposing amendments that would allow it, together with Botswana, Namibia and South Africa – home to about 265 000 elephants – to trade in ivory from government stockpiles. The proposal is framed around the funding challenges faced by most state agencies responsible for elephant conservation in Africa.
The proponents regard Cites as an inhibitor and not an enabler of progress towards the continued protection of large African elephant populations, and that Cites decisions remove, rather than create incentives for conservation.
“The proponents furthermore reflect on the lack of scientific evidence to support the view that a complete ban on ivory trade results in elephant population recovery,” said the Cites Secretariat in its assessment of proposals to amend appendices I and II.
Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe’s elephant populations are secure and expanding, said Zimbabwe’s proposal. It is time to remove the anomaly of having 256,000 elephant on Appendix II being treated as if they are on Appendix I, against the wishes of the people who own them and who have the most to lose or gain from them. “
The Secretariat said: “The potential risks of increased poaching or illegal trade in ivory associated with a legal trade in registered government-owned raw ivory stocks, or measures to address these risks, are not elaborated upon in the supporting statement,” describing how with the recent closure of domestic markets in Asia, “it’s not clear which country or country might be a possible trading partner”.
Mary Rice, the executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who leads its elephant campaign, said in light of the existing international trade bans in rhino horn and ivory, the proposals to resume international trade effectively undermine the intensive efforts made by source, transit and consumer markets to tackle illegal trade.
One-off sales in ivory in 2008 “saw the biggest spike in illegal trade”, she said. “Legal markets simply provide a laundering mechanism for illegal ivory as well as sustaining and stimulating a market for products from species, which are finite and irreplaceable”.
Meanwhile, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Senegal and Syria are proposing that all African elephants, including southern Africa’s populations, be listed on Appendix 1. Ten African countries, too, have proposed completely destroying national ivory stockpiles while another by Kenya wants to establish a fund for the non-commercial disposal of ivory stockpiles.
Rhino trade
Botswana and Namibia are proposing to move the Namibian population of white rhinos from Appendix I to Appendix II, while Eswatini is requesting that its rhinos are down-listed to Appendix II to enable “regulated legal trade in Eswatini’s white rhinos, their products including horn and derivatives”.
“Unlike Namibia, the country is not active in the markets for live sales or hunting trophies, and thus wants to secure benefits from the sale of horn and other rhino parts,” said Francois Vorheis, the director of the African Wildlife Economy Institute, in the statement.
“Will Botswana, Namibia, and Eswatini be supported by the other African countries or by enough other countries to remove some of the non-tariff barriers to trade in rhino products? If Namibian rhinos are moved to Appendix II but not Eswatini rhinos, will this be a step towards possible further trade liberalisation at the next COP?”
Poaching and illegal trade to meet consumer demand for rhino horn continues to be the main threats to the survival of Africa’s rhinos, said Taylor Trench, senior wildlife policy analyst at the EIA.
“White rhinos in particular have experienced severe declines over the past decade and overturning the Cites ban on international trade in rhino horn would serve only to increase demand, lead to more poaching, undermine demand reduction and enforcement actions. We are hopeful that Cites parties will reject the proposal from Eswatini as they have at the two previous Cites CoPs in 2019 and 2016.”
Trench said Namibia has made good progress to grow its population of white rhinos, but its population of white rhinos is still small at about 1 200 individuals and remains threatened by poaching and rhino horn trafficking.
“Rhino poaching has actually increased in Namibia this year compared to the previous two years. Now is simply not the time to weaken Cites protection for rhinos.”
Hippo tusks and teeth
Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Gabon, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo want hippos to be moved from Appendix II to Appendix I.
They argue that legal international trade in hippo parts and products – teeth and tusks – is having a detrimental impact on hippos by providing an avenue to market illegally acquired specimens from poached hippos into trade.
An analysis of CoP19 proposals by Traffic and International Union for Conservation of Nature notes that hippos don’t have a restricted range or a small population. This means they are present in eastern and southern Africa. They also don’t appear to have decreasing numbers. They would not therefore appear to meet the biological criteria for inclusion in Appendix I. “Hippo products, mainly teeth and tusks, are in legal and illegal trade, predominantly from Uganda and Tanzania; this trade is not considered a significant threat to the species as this trade has remained stable or declined over the last 10 years.”
Safety net for imperilled sharks
Every year about 100 million sharks are killed in commercial fisheries worldwide, and only 25% of the global trade is regulated, Cites said. “Action is long overdue – 70% of species in trade are already threatened with extinction.”
Panama is leading a globally supported Cites-listing effort to bring most of the global shark fin trade under Cites regulation, where conservationists say the adoption of the requiem and hammerhead shark proposals is a top priority.
The shark proposals are important, said Markus Burgener, a senior fisheries expert at Traffic. “If you look at the stats and the number of shark species whose conservation status is threatened, sharks are not in a good place.”
(Photo by ANTONY DICKSON / AFP)
Cites has played an increasing role in shark protection in commercial fisheries. “Compared to 10 years ago, there were a few sharks listed in the Cites appendices, but they were not commercially targeted species,” Burgener said, explaining how around eight years ago commercially caught shark species started to become listed on Cites.
“There’s a real mix of fisheries that catch sharks, some of them it’s targeted, but many other fisheries around the world are not actually targeting sharks, they’re targeting tuna predominantly,” he said, explaining how sharks are caught as bycatch in many fisheries in South Africa.
“Even if you were to take away the fin trade completely, even if that were to stop, millions of sharks would still be caught every year. There would still be a market for the meat,” he said, adding that the global ban on finning in fisheries, while hard to implement, “is one of the best things that has happened”.
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