SHARON HAMMOND, Nelspruit | Thursday 2.45pm.
MOZAMBIQUE will lift its ban on elephant hunting in the next month and start selling off 1,8 tonnes of ivory seized from poachers.
The ban was introduced in 1990 after the government signed the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species.
The convention was amended this year to allow elephant hunting under strict conditions.
Mozambican Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Agostinho Carlos do Rosario, said the ivory would be sold abroad and the revenue generated spent on the conservation of the country’s remaining elephants.
Mozambique as about 15000 elephants left – 9000 in Niassa province, 5000 in Tete, 2500 in Cabo Delgado and 600 in Sofala.
The lifting of the ban is especially welcomed by peasant farmers in Niassa, who regularly lose their subsistence crops to elephants.
Farmers in Niassa’s Lichinga region have been the most outspoken proponents of elephant hunting and have already threatened to shoot “problem elephants”.
Do Rosario stressed that “spot hunting” would only be allowed in areas where there there was a proven “excess” of elephants, however, and where the state and other conservation agencies had no capacity to control them.
Hunting would be prohibited in areas where conservation bodies could prove that there were realistic alternative control measures, he added. African Eye News Service