¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

FOUR YEARS ago, a bagpipe-maker in Edinburgh stopped using ivory for
his mouthpieces and trimmings. News reports and television programmes persuaded
him that he was contributing to the extinction of the African elephant.
Then another newspaper article convinced him that the trade in ivory from
southern Africa was largely responsible for the increase in the number of
elephants in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. He happily began making
bagpipes again with the traditional materials, even though they cost three
times as much as plastic.

The bagpipe-maker’s dilemma is the nub of a dispute that has split Africa
and the world on how to save the wild African elephant for future generations.

In October, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) meets in Switzerland, with the elephant at the top of its agenda.
At the meeting, an attempt will be made to ban ivory and all other elephant
products from international trade. Tanzania and Kenya are behind this proposal,
which is backed mainly by pressure groups financed by the US. They argue
that international demand for ivory is the incentive for poachers to indulge
in wholesale slaughter, and that the number of elephants killed purely for
the ivory trade threatens the continued survival of the largest land animal
on Earth. They want to see the elephant moved from Appendix II of CITES,
which permits limited trade, to Appendix I, which bans all trade and ostensibly
affords the highest protection.

The trade in raw ivory fluctuated between 600 and 1160 tonnes a year
from 1979 to 1986, with the price of ivory ranging from $63 to $260 per
kilogram. ‘Market prices for ivory are now so high that poachers are prepared
to risk their lives to get it,’ said Constantius Mlay, wildlife director
for Tanzania. ‘If countries do not act together to close off the market,
we will not win the war.’

Southern Africa is against a trade ban, however. Leading the opposition
is Zimbabwe. ‘The countries pressing for the ban are precisely those which
have failed disastrously in the management of their elephant populations,’
said a member of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. ‘We in the
south have the only successful elephant management programmes in Africa.
We will not abandon them either to save face for other countries that have
failed, or to provide more employment for London and Washington-based conservation
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At a stormy meeting of the CITES African Elephant Working Group (AEWG)
in Gaborone, Botswana, last month the East African countries presented figures
to show how severe the plight of the elephant has become. The range of the
African elephant has shrunk from 7.3 million square kilometres to 5.9 million
square kilometres (a reduction of 20 per cent) in the past decade. According
to Tanzania and Kenya, this is not the result of loss of habitat to agriculture
or development but is because the animal has been exterminated across vast
swathes of land. The population of elephants has decreased by 52 per cent
since 1979. According to Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a wildlife biologist who
has studied African elephants for decades, the population fell from 1.3
million in 1979 to 735,000 in 1988. Today the population stands at 625 000.

In Tanzania alone, poachers have slaughtered 22 200 elephants every
year since 1981. In 1973 more than 130 000 elephants lived in Kenya. Today
there are only 16 000. The country lost 72 per cent of the elephants in
areas that were supposedly protected and 92 per cent of those outside. In
the same period, Uganda’s elephant population has dropped from around 18
000 to fewer than 1900.

Behind the figures of slaughter by illegal hunters lies a further, hidden,
tragedy. ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs who have been studying elephants in Amboseli National
Park in Kenya since 1972 say that for every adult female killed, at least
one immature elephant will probably die. A calf younger than two years old
stands no chance of surviving the death of its mother; while a calf orphaned
between 2 and 5 years old has a 30 per cent chance of survival, and one
aged between 6 and 10 years has a 48 per cent chance of survival.

Gunning for the males

Furthermore, poaching has seriously disrupted breeding patterns in some
herds because the gunmen pick off the big tuskers, the older and most sexually
active males. Recent studies in Amboseli (protected from illegal hunting
by the presence of the researchers for more than 10 years) show a ratio
among breeding adults of 78 per cent females to 22 per cent males. In Tanzania’s
Mikumi reserve, where poachers are very active, the ratio was 99.6 per cent
females to 0.4 per cent males. Populations in Queen Elizabeth Park in Uganda
and Tsavo in Kenya – both almost totally cleaned out by poachers – were
similarly skewed. Some researchers suggest that the chances of mating successfully
under these conditions are slim: an elephant cow is fertile for only 2 days
during her three-monthly oestrus, and must find a rutting male during this
brief period. In Tanzania’s Mkomasi game reserve, rangers found no male
elephants in 1988; a count in 1969 showed that 43 per cent of its herd were
males.

As males with big tusks become scarce, hunters turn their automatic
weapons on groups of females and youngsters, further disrupting the elephant’s
highly organised social life. According to Joyce Poole, of the African Wildlife
Foundation in Nairobi, a healthy family group is usually led by an older
matriarch with wisdom accrued over years, and little ones depend on juvenile
females for protection and nurturing. Many of the herds wandering the ranges
of East Africa today are like rudderless ships.

Mlay predicts that, at the present rate of decline, the elephant will
be extinct in East Africa within seven years, and across the continent by
the year 2015. This view of an Africa without elephants is tragic, and East
Africa’s prescribed solution has found ready supporters in the rest of the
world. No sooner had Tanzania and Kenya placed their proposal for a trade
ban before CITES in May than the US and the European Community unilaterally
banned ivory imports.

Unfortunately, the East Africans had failed to consult other African
states with important populations of elephants. When they arrived in Gaborone
last month, they found people they assumed would support their move outraged
by their unilateral action and totally dismissive of their analysis.

‘How can they talk about extinction when 200 000 elephants are as safe
as the car in your garage?’ asked a delegate from Zimbabwe. He was talking
about the herds in southern Africa, ranging from Angola and Zambia southwards.
Estimating the size of populations is an inexact and controversial procedure
involving techniques as varied as counting turds in forests to observing
animals in savanna country from the air. But the elephant populations in
three southern African countries are indisputably growing. According to
Douglas-Hamilton, the elephant population of Zimbabwe has swelled from 30
000 a decade ago to more than 43 000 today. Botswana’s population has more
than doubled, from a roughly estimated 20 000 in 1979 to more than 51 000.
And South Africa’s small population of 7800 in 1979 has grown to more than
8200.

The southern African countries do not oppose the ban simply so that
they can continue a lucrative trade. They argue that the success of their
programmes of elephant management depends on the animal having a financial
value. South Africa and Zimbabwe need to cull their elephants annually.
Every bit of the carcass is used: the meat goes to the local people and
skin and ivory to international trade, the proceeds of which are ploughed
directly back into conservation. The Kruger National Park, home to a population
held at around 7500, earns nearly Pounds sterling 2 million (a tenth of
its budget) by culling 600 animals each year. The Zimbabwe Wildlife Department
earns about Pounds sterling 3 million a year in the same way.

At Gaborone, positions were entrenched, tempers inflamed and the politics
dirty. ‘The Tanzanians have got religion, and their minds are closed to
other philosophies,’ said one Zimbabwean. ‘The only thing missing from their
presentation was a ‘hallelujah’ at the end.’ The delegation from the US
government threatened to reduce its aid to Zimbabwe and Botswana if they
opposed the call for a total ban on trade. This prompted a bitter comment
from George Pangeti, Zimbabwe’s wildlife director: ‘I thought bribing officials
was exactly the sort of corrupt behaviour that’s contributing to the problems
elsewhere in Africa.’

Members of international conservation pressure groups, present at the
conference as observers, said that they would hound the southern African
states if they continued to trade. ‘We’ll be crawling round the world going
through the dustbins of these organisations to see where their ivory is
coming from,’ said Dave Currey of the Environmental Investigation Agency,
which is based in London.

The pressure groups also vowed to embarrass the southern African bloc
by exploiting the fact that it includes South Africa. The Tanzanians and
Kenyans said they would take the issue to the Organisation of African Unity
(OAU). Chris Huxley, a biologist and former member of the CITES Secretariat
who now works as a consultant to Zimbabwe, commented: ‘I’m quite sure the
people pressing for an Appendix I listing will have no scruples whatsoever
about using political tactics to wreck good conservation programmes.’

Baffled by the hostile intransigence of the East Africans and their
backers, Botswana’s director of wildlife, Kukame Ngwamotsoko, said: ‘Countries
with problems should seek advice from successful countries rather than trying
to impose a course of action not proven to work.’ A place on Appendix I
has done little to help the black rhino. It has simply driven a thriving
trade in rhino horn underground, and the continental population of rhinos
has crashed from 65 000 in the late 1960s to less than 3500 today.

Zimbabwe does not dispute that at the current rate of decline Kenya’s
elephant population will all but disappear within 5 years. But it believes
Kenya and Tanzania are seeking international intervention in what are essentially
national problems. Zimbabwe believes that the application for Appendix I
listing will divert attention from the real underlying cause for the decline
of the elephant in Africa, which is a lack of effective law enforcement.

Kenya’s new director of wildlife, Richard Leakey, admitted as much.
He told a meeting of the Kalahari Conservation Society, on the fringe of
the main conference in Gaborone, that he had inherited a department that
did not have a single working vehicle. ‘Government neglect of conservation
has permitted the poachers to have our parks to themselves as private hunting
blocks with their vehicles, modern weapons and chain saws,’ he said.

Zimbabwe argues that if international conservationists make elephant
products valueless, there will be no incentives for local people living
among the animals outside the national parks to conserve them. ‘Two years
ago in Zimbabwe we started letting people, for the first time, own the game
on their land. Now they’re asking for it to be stocked with impala, not
goats. That has to be a good thing, because nobody comes to Africa to see
goats,’ said Rowan Martin, deputy director of wildlife.

Rural development programmes based on wildlife now operate in some 25
tribal lands in Zimbabwe: they rely on elephant for the biggest slice of
their income. ‘No farmer will tolerate elephant (which trample fields and
smash water points) when they are valueless, and a ban will have the direct
effect of making the animal extinct on tribal lands,’ said Martin. ‘After
all, there are not a helluva lot of elephants in people’s back gardens in
Kent or Connecticut.’

A document shown to ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ shows that the CITES Secretariat seems
to hold the same view. ‘The CITES Secretariat is of the opinion that the
transfer to Appendix I would not contribute to the conservation of the African
elephant, and may in fact be counterproductive,’ the document says. ‘To
deny countries potential revenues from animals harvested under strictly
controlled conditions is to threaten the continuation of these conservation
programmes through lack of adequate financing.

‘It is widely acknowledged that the African elephant is a keystone species,
from an ecological perspective. Through careful management and conservation
practices, it can also serve as an important focal point for community development
. . . The removal of the incentive to conserve elephants, which would accompany
a total ban on trade, could very well lead to the destruction of the remaining
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It is not only the countries with successful programmes for managing
elephants that are fighting the proposed trade ban. Others with disastrous
track records in preserving elephants have begun to align themselves with
the southern nations because they recognise the soundness of their management
philosophies.

Wildlife for the people

Perhaps the most important example comes from Zambia, where Richard
Bell is directing a project in the Luangwa Valley which gives income from
wildlife to the local people. Bell, a biologist born and brought up in Africa,
has always had reservations about traditional conservation practices. ‘The
institutional nature of conservation was established during the colonial
period; it has strong paternalistic and racist elements to it, and is itself
a large part of the problem,’ he said. ‘What has happened is that the control
of natural resources has been progressively taken away from rural communities
by central government bureaucracies, and the benefits flowing from them
have also been progressively concentrated in national treasuries. In effect,
a wall has been erected between rural communities and the resources among
which they live.’

Bell, appointed as director of the South Luangwa and Lupande Development
project in 1986, and Fidelis Lungu, his coordinator, are working against
a background of years of gross mismanagement of Zambia’s wildlife: the elephant
population alone has shrunk from 150 000 in 1979 to about 40 000 now. The
essence of the project is to return responsibility for game, and the benefits
gained from it, to the rural people. ‘The formal objective of the programme
is to improve the standard of living of the people through the sustainable
use of the full range of natural resources available to them,’ explained
Bell. Fees from hunting licences, safari concessions, park entry, timber
licences, and fishing permits now go directly into the project’s coffers
instead of to Lusaka. The income is divided 60/40 between the project’s
revolving fund and the local people, who decide among themselves whether
they want to spend it on schools, clinics or other projects. People in the
area have been living in dire poverty; now Bell and Lungu are opening bank
accounts for each of the six chieftainships representing the 35 000 people
in the project.

Bell’s goal is to manage the area’s resources in a sustainable way.
The chief’s committees divide the area into blocks according to how the
land is used, for agriculture, for example, or forestry, or wildlife. Each
year, technical teams make an inventory of the animals in each chieftainship
and they decide, according to biological criteria, how many of each species
can be killed and still maintain the population. These quotas are fixed;
there can be no haggling over them. But the chiefs’ committees decide who
shall have the right to kill which animals.

Fourteen categories of ‘killing rights’ have been worked out, each with
different economic and social implications for the community. The options
include measures for protecting crops, district licences (for hunters from
the community); national licences (for hunters from farther afield); licences
for safari hunting; licences for commercial culling, and licences for traditional
tribal celebrations.

This year, for example, one chieftainship has received a quota of 200
baboons for one block. The community decided to kill 170 of the baboons
to protect their crops and 30 for sale as food to a local crocodile farm.
The implications of this decision are that the ‘asset value’ of the baboons
killed to save crops remains with the families on whose land the animals
have been wreaking havoc, while the asset value of those killed for crocodile
food goes into the communal purse.

The people have quickly learnt to work out the most lucrative categories
to which to allocate ‘killing rights’, said Bell. ‘Under the district licence
a small fee goes to the revolving fund – for example, a buffalo costs about
300 Kwacha – and the local guy gets meat for his family. A national licence
for the same buffalo would bring in about 700 Kwacha; of course the guy
throws the animal in the back of his truck and takes the meat to Lusaka
or wherever, so the local people get nothing out of the transaction except
the basic fee. Safari is where the big money is: for that same buffalo the
local people would probably get 20 000 Kwacha in foreign exchange, but again
none of the meat.’ The right to kill elephants

Bell sees elephant as potentially the most valuable asset on the land.
‘The day we could put 20 elephants on our safari quota, we’d double our
revenue,’ he said. ‘And we’d double it again the day we could start culling.’
At present there are 12 500 elephants in the South Luangwa National Park
and Lupande Game Management Area. Bell wants the population to reach 20
000 before local people can start harvesting elephant. ‘If poaching stopped
today, it would take about 10 years for the population to reach this level,’
he said.

Bell paints a grim picture of the wastage caused by poaching. Since
1973 poachers have taken elephant products worth about $500 million out
of the Luangwa Valley. This amounts to half of Zambia’s debt to the International
Monetary Fund, and less than 1 per cent of the value of the poached elephants
has remained within the country.

In view of this, it is strange to find that ‘poaching’ is one of the
14 categories of ‘killing rights’. Bell explains: ‘I don’t actually like
the word ‘poacher’ when applied to someone from the local community; it
has connotations of some faceless force of evil. In fact, the local poacher
is usually a well-known, highly skilled man, admired for the way he beats
what is seen as a repressive system.’ The inclusion of the ‘poaching’ category
is a recognition of a practice that the villagers have always regarded as
legitimate. Bell hoped that by giving game management ‘a reasonably humane
image instead of one of local repression’, the local poachers would feel
free to apply for local hunting licences. That has happened, and the old
‘poachers’ receive priority in local licence quotas. Much to Bell’s satisfaction,
the ‘poaching’ allocation on his computer sheets amounts to a long row of
zeros.

Professional poaching by outsiders is altogether different, and Bell
will give no quarter to the heavily armed gangs from central Zambia who
have devastated the national parks. He is involved with training a crack
anti-poaching unit. The unit has already arrested 300 illegal hunters since
October 1988, and traced a smuggling network to a North Korean aid worker
found in possession of 20 rhino horns, worth $100 000.

Highly sensitive to international opinion and keen to demonstrate its
concern for a beleaguered species, Zambia has announced a unilateral ban
on exports of ivory. However, this is seen as a way of keeping its options
open at the meeting in October rather than as an indication of how it will
vote in Lausanne.

The vote in Lausanne will profoundly affect Bell’s work in the Luangwa
valley. ‘An Appendix I listing is in direct contradiction to what we’re
trying to achieve in our project,’ he insists. ‘Imagine what the local people
will feel if we have to go back to them and say: ‘Sorry, the elephant now
has no value, and responsibility for this particular animal has been taken
out of your hands again. But this time decisions will be made not in Lusaka
but in Switzerland’.’

* * *

How CITES has failed to protect the elephant

A CONTROLLED trade in ivory operates under the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). But gaping loopholes in the system
mean that, in effect, it has acted as a cover for a vast illegal trade.
In 1986 legal exports of ivory accounted for only 22 per cent of the world
trade.

Shortcomings of the present system include:

A lack of controls on worked ivory. The people who devised the CITES
system assumed that they need only put legal controls on the flow of raw
ivory. They thought that there would be no need to keep tabs on what was
made from it. Furthermore, they argued that the paperwork involved in following
every bit of artwork, ranging from carved tusks to inlaid chess boards,
would choke the system.

This loophole has been exploited by ivory syndicates based in Hong Kong,
which set up processing centres in countries that are not signatories to
CITES and which are easy points of entry for illegal raw ivory. Once the
raw ivory is processed, it can enter the system with no questions asked
about its origins. No sooner has one such centre been discovered and closed
down by pressure from CITES, than another is set up elsewhere. The action
has moved, for example, from Macau to Singapore, to Taiwan and Dubai: vast
quantities of ivory have entered the marketplace this way.

The export quotas for raw ivory are not set according to biological
criteria. Under the quota system, introduced in 1986 to try to avoid overexploitation
of elephants, an exporting country sets the figure for itself and informs
the CITES secretariat. Many quotas bear no relation to the number of elephants
that live in the country in question.

Governments operating within the CITES system can apply for legal documents
to export ivory that they have confiscated from poachers or smugglers. This
way, much of the ivory legally in circulation comes from animals that were
killed illegally, making a mockery of any attempt to distinguish between
a moral and an immoral ivory trade.

Countries belatedly joining CITES can bring all their smuggled ivory
from under the table and register it for legal trade. When Singapore – for
many years the most notorious entrepot for illegal ivory – joined CITES
in 1986, for example, its stockpile of nearly 300 tonnes of raw ivory was
immediately given legal documentation. And because it could then be traded
openly, its value rose.

The Hong-Kong based dealer who owned the stocks is said to have made
so much money from the instant ‘laundering’ of his illegal ivory that he
bought a sophisticated office block in the centre of Hong Kong.

The southern African countries, which are determined at all costs to
go on trading in elephant products, and their biggest customers, Japan and
Hong Kong, believe that it is possible to devise a system that will plug
these loopholes. It may not be watertight, but it should at least leak less.
They are working together on a new trade formula to put before the CITES
conference in Lausanne in October.

Sue Armstrong and Fred Bridgland are freelance journalists working in
Africa.