The department of environmental affairs and tourism has slammed the decision by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) to suspend the sale of 60 tons of stockpiled ivory held by South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, arguing that it would not trigger an increase in poaching.
”We [South Africa] are not happy because we have 30 tons of stockpiled ivory and that money would have helped to advance our conservation mandate,” said the department’s acting chief director of communications, Blessing Manale, refuting Cites’s reasoning. ”There are no sales now and there is still an illegal market.” Botswana had planned to sell 20 tons and Namibia had 10 tons up for sale.
The Geneva-based Cites secretariat agreed in principle to the sales in 2002, provided that the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants (Mike) system provided updated and thorough baseline data on poaching and population levels.
The Mike system, employed by countries with significant elephant populations that also have a history of poaching, includes countries such as South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Malaysia and India. It was established in 1997 to document trends in the illegal hunting of elephants and to help countries with roaming animal populations keep track of the effects of Cites decisions. Cites came into being in 1975 to regulate the growing trade in endangered species. It banned the sale of ivory in 1989.
Today, more than 160 countries are signatories to the Cites convention. The resolution to suspend the sale followed concerns that, after nine years, Mike data was ”incomplete, unreliable and based on flawed assumptions”. Moreover, the Mike data presented to the Cites secretariat in Geneva made no mention of the ivory seized this year, which is thought to emanate from poaching activities.
According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, 10 tons of ivory were seized in Hong Kong and Taiwan between May and July this year, which potentially represents 800 elephants.
”SADC [Southern African Development Community] countries have a solid track record in their labelling system, so that if they sold ivory it wouldn’t be mixed up with illegal stocks, wherever those stocks are,” said Manale. ”The issue is not that the sale in legal stocks will increase poaching, but that we are hoping the funds will scale up anti-poaching activities. There is no contradiction in selling legal ivory and controlling poaching.”
When the Cites decision was announced, The International Fund for Animal Welfare called it a victory for conservationists. South African communications manager for the fund, Christina Pretorius, said that the sale of ivory should not be permissible under any circumstances. ”Ideally, you could destroy the ivory or keep it locked up until poaching is stamped out in its entirety, which is unlikely to happen. But a strong message should be sent out nonetheless.”
Pretorius said that Botswana and South Africa had good systems in place to protect and manage their elephants, but this was not the case elsewhere in Africa. ”We cannot look at the countries that are selling in isolation. We are part of a larger continent where elephants are under threat. The countries wanting to sell are not beset by poaching problems, but the same is not true for all of Africa. By encouraging legal sales, we are encouraging poaching elsewhere in Africa.”
David Newton of Traffic, an international NGO active in wildlife protection, said it was still impossible to say with certainty whether legal ivory sales would encourage poaching. ”It would be hard to determine those trends because the systems needed to monitor that are not in place yet. That is why it is important that, until the Mike system is properly implemented, the trade in ivory doesn’t happen.”