Ethiopia this week handed over to Kenya more than three dozen elephant tusks seized 18 months ago from smugglers in a border town — one of the largest hauls of illegal ivory in recent years, Kenyan wildlife officials said.
Kenyan authorities suspect the 37 tusks — a total of 145kg of ivory — handed over at a ceremony in the border town of Moyale were cut from 50 elephants killed in northern Kenya in the first four months of last year, said Ngugi Gecaga, a spokesperson for Kenya Wildlife Services.
The ivory, which will be stored indefinitely in Kenya, may have been destined for China or Japan, where it is often carved into decorative ornaments and good-luck charms, he said.
The ivory was seized in April 2002 when Ethiopian officials in Moyale — a town split between Ethiopia and Kenya — found the 37 tusks cut into pieces and hidden in a truck, said Mohamed Abdi, an official from the Ethiopian Wildlife and Conservation Organisation.
He could not say what happened to the man who was driving the truck.
Despite an international ban on trading in elephant tusks, there is a robust black-market trade in ivory in East Asia.
The United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), which banned the ivory trade in 1989, said in an October 2002 report that economic growth in China was fuelling demand for ivory. The report singled out Ethiopia as one of the largest exporters of illegal African ivory.
But Ethiopia has only a small elephant population and most of the ivory smuggled from the Horn of Africa nation is thought to come from neighboring countries with larger herds, like Kenya, where elephant hunting was banned in 1978 but poaching continues.
In February Kenyan game wardens seized 33 elephant tusks in north central Kenya and arrested several suspected smugglers.
Kenya opposed a decision by Cites last November to allow Botswana, Namibia and South Africa to sell more than 60 tonnes of stockpiled ivory — worth about $5-million — arguing that such a move would increase poaching throughout the continent.