Over the next two weeks 59 tons of African ivory will be sold to Japan. Leading elephant researchers argue this could open the door to wider elephant slaughter
Three shipments of 59,1 tons of ivory will be auctioned and sold to Japanese traders in the next two weeks, in terms of a recent international decision to allow limited resumed international trade in ivory.
It will come from stockpiles kept by Nambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana – which will sell 13,8 tons, 20 tons and 25,3 tons respectively. The three countries were given the green light for a one-time sale to Japan at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in mid-March.
This decision breaks a pattern established in a 10-year trade ban on ivory and is termed “experimental”, suggesting that further ivory sales will be proposed if the present trades are deemed successful.
When these sales were initially approved in June 1997, several conditions were attached to the approval. The most important condition was that a system must be developed to measure the impact of resumed trade on elephant populations throughout Africa and Asia.
The authorisation given in March this year for the sales to go ahead reflects the satisfaction of a Cites committee with a draft description of a trade and monitoring system called “Monitoring illegal killing of elephants” (Mike).
We believe the committee’s approval of Mike was inadvisable. This programme may be capable of measuring large-scale changes in elephant populations – and in this respect have value – but it is far from capable of gathering the details that would be needed to link subtle changes to their causes.
We are also uncomfortable with the fact that no requirement was made for this or any other monitoring system to be up and running before the current ivory trades were made. The combination of these two omissions with the notion that the present transactions are “experimental” spells a dangerous situation for elephants.
Whether any ivory trade at all is desirable is the subject of an intense ongoing debate, not only in Cites meetings but also among elephant researchers, managers, conservationists and lay people all over the world.
Authorities do not agree on how the renewal of legal ivory trade would affect the many elephant populations spread across Africa and Asia. What is clear is that different populations would be differently affected, because nations differ in their agendas for elephant management and in the extent of their ability to manage or protect their wildlife.
For example, many members of wildlife departments in Southern Africa believe a renewal of international trade in ivory would promote motivation for conservation. Regarding trade in ivory as a cornerstone of their sustainable utilisation policies, they cull elephants in areas of density and stockpile the ivory for future sale.
A different attitude prevails in much of East Africa. There, a rash of poaching had drastically reduced elephant populations during the decade before the 1989 trade ban. Those populations have stabilised since the ban went into effect, but the socio-economic human situations that earlier fuelled extensive poaching have not improved. As a result, a continuing ban on international trade in ivory is viewed as imperative.
In Asia still a third perspective prevails. Asian elephants are a severely endangered species: regardless of the presence or absence of potential markets, all international trade in their ivory is illegal. Poaching is nonetheless on the rise, indicating the continuation of small-scale local and/or black-market trading.
Our concern is for elephants everywhere. There are places where the availability of a lucrative ivory market may increase the incentive for poaching.
There are also places where it may increase the incentive for culling, a costly operation, the extent of which is determined by the priorities of national governments.
The decisions that have just reached fruition – to trade in stockpiled ivory and to assess the impact of the trade on elephant populations – are momentous and the link between them is essential.
The Cites committee was not authorised to approve trade in ivory in the absence of a method whereby the impact of the trade on elephant populations would be assessed.
We believe such a method is still lacking. Each of us has attempted to count elephants by various methods and can attest that a reliable, sensitive census is extremely difficult even in the best of circumstances.
To assemble a comprehensive programme that would not only be sensitive to minor changes in elephant populations in varied environments but that also would relate such changes to their underlying causes strikes us as nearly impossible – at best it would require knowledge about dimensions that are not covered in Mike’s design.
Without a good monitoring programme, however, the impact of trade in ivory on living elephants will not be scientifically evaluated. So we must be more careful in the future. The next meeting of Cites is scheduled for April 2000 in Nairobi. If further requests for ivory sales are proposed, the following points must then be made:
l A satisfactory draft for a global elephant population-ivory trade monitoring system was not produced, nor was any system in place, before the 1999 sales were authorised.
l As a result, sufficient information will not be available in 2000 to justify further ivory sales.
l Scientific credibility must be a prerequisite for any system designed to monitor elephant populations. Such credibility is evidenced in the form of peer review, which was largely lacking in the case of Mike at the time of its acceptance by Cites.
l In the absence of an adequate means for assessing the relationship between trade in ivory and the health of all elephant populations that may potentially be affected by that trade, further sales must not be authorised.
Authors Katy Payne, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Cynthia Moss and Joyce Poole are American and East African biologists whose research focuses on the behaviour and conservation of elephants
ENDS