elephants
When the rejoicing dies down, it will be time for the Cites signatories who supported the ivory downlisting to prevent a new wave of elephant slaughter, writes Eddie Koch
THE South African government, along with those of Cites’s 138 member nations who voted to allow Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to renew limited trade in elephant tusks with Japan, bear an awesome moral burden.
It is their duty to ensure the new ivory trade does not stimulate a wave of elephant slaughter in the politically turbulent countries north of the Zambezi River.
The Cites signatories who supported downlisting will have to take seriously the grim warnings by animal rights groups that thousands of elephants in Central Africa – especially the forest herds in the Democratic Republic of Congo that are reputed to be the biggest left in the world – run the risk of being decimated as poaching syndicates prepare for a re- opening of the ivory markets.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare has a powerful set of arguments to back its claim that this prospect is imminent in the wake of Cites’s decision to allow a controlled commerce with Japan involving tusks held in certified stockpiles by the three Southern African countries.
“The controls suggested in the Cites decision are so complex that they will not be able to be implemented in advanced developed countries. Countries like Zimbabwe, which by their own admission do not have the capacity to monitor a legal trade, will not be able to enforce these,” says Chris Styles, programme co-ordinator of the international fund.
“We predict these countries will become conduits for illicit ivory especially from the volatile Central African countries. There will be a massive wave of poaching in the near future from these countries as organised syndicates realise there are now new conduits through the south of Africa for their ivory.”
The fund’s Africa director, David Barritt, says he was personally present in the Congo recently when military officers were interrogating a group of poachers caught shooting elephants with automatic rifles in that country.
“They specifically said they had been supplied with weapons and ammunition by middlemen who wanted to build up their stocks of elephant tusks because there was likely to be a new trade in ivory.”
He adds that the borders between Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia are so porous it is almost impossible to prevent tusks coming into these countries from the north.
It would then be up to conservation officials in the southern countries to ensure that their legal stockpiles do not provide an opportunity to launder tusks obtained illicitly and smuggled into these countries.
South Africa’s achievement at Cites was to broker an agreement that allowed trade in existing stockpiles of ivory – and specifically not tusks from newly hunted elephants – in return for a comprehensive set of law enforcement measures and monitoring controls to prevent poached tusks from being circulated to the Far East along legal channels.
And any of the three countries caught poaching will have their ivory and elephants uplifted to the Cites Appendix One which bans all trade in their products.
“These controls will be difficult to implement even by sophisticated development countries,” says Barritt. “The mechanisms for reimposing the ban on countries that do not comply with the controls are so vague that they are unlikely to act as an effective deterrent.”
Peter Jewell, a retired professor of zoology from the University of Cambridge, says it would be almost impossible for Cites’s new monitoring bodies to verify that tusks moving between Africa and Japan come from certified government stockpiles. Jewell, who has worked in East Africa on methods to determine scientifically where ivory stockpiles originated, says a tusk’s origin can only be confirmed by sophisticated isotope analysis.
This involves using minute traces of carbon, nitrogen and strontium in the ivory to reveal a “fingerprint” specific to a particular geographic location. Adds Jewell, who worked for a number of years in East Africa on methods to verify the origins of tusk: “But this is far too expensive to apply on a wide scale. Any programme for marking ivory to certify that it is legal is open to forgers.”
But Greg Overton, programme officer for the Nairobi-based African Elephant Specialist Group of the IUCN-World Conservation Union, believes the controls can work.
He also points out the Cites resolution stipulates all revenues from the new ivory traffic have to be ploughed back into elephant conservation work or community development programmes.
“Even if illegal ivory gets into the stockpiles of any of the three countries, how would an individual profit, seeing as all proceeds from the sale of ivory is monitored and must go back into conservation of elephants?” says Overton. “The control measures are so comprehensive that it would be difficult for Japan or any of the three African countries to launder illegal tusks.”
In fact, says Overton, the Cites decision will allow more monitoring of the Central African forest elephants because it motivates for member countries to make funds available for proper monitoring of elephant numbers, and surveillance of poaching operations, throughout Africa.
Now that Cites has made its agonised decision, the only way to prevent the ghastly predictions of those who mourned rather than celebrated in the aisles of the convention centre in Harare from coming true, is for those parties who voted in favour of elephant downlisting to put their money behind their ballot.
As the World Wide Fund for Nature said in its comment on the issue: “The parties [to Cites] now face a critical challenge in fulfilling these conditions which if met could work for elephant conservation. They must move cautiously and with full commitment.”