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Would-be traders in ivory and illicit furs will be holding their breath
next week as delegates gather in Kyoto, Japan, for the biennenial Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species. Among those vying for a place
on the CITES ark this year will be creatures as diverse as the arctic bear,
whose gall bladders are in demand by practioners of traditional Asian medicine,
and the bog turtle, which is under pressure from the pet trade and the spread
of golf courses through its north American habitats. Even the humble herring
and the mahogany tree will be discussed as part of a bold attempt to extend
the treaty’s authority beyond rare wildlife. Yet, for all this, it will
be the African elephant which attracts most publicity and the bulk of delegates’
time, just as it did when CITES last met. The long-running dispute over
how best to conserve the largest land mammal in the world is about to erupt
all over again.

At issue is the trade ban on ivory imposed by CITES in 1989 after a
decade of heavy poaching. This ban is now up for review, and Zimbabwe and
five other southern African countries – Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South
Africa and Zambia – will be lobbying hard in Kyoto for a partial relaxation.
They want to downgrade their own elephant populations from the convention’s
Appendix 1, its list of the wholly sacrosanct, to Appendix 2, which permits
regulated trade in some animal products. What they have in mind is a strictly
controlled trade in ivory, involving just one exporter – a cartel of ivory
producing nations – and one major importer, Japan.

Conservationists in eastern and central Africa, along with many wildlife
pressure groups, are up in arms over the proposal. Such a move, they fear,
could revive the poaching epidemic which the 1989 ban curbed so successfully.
For them, the pressing issue is what steps in addition to the ban should
be taken to prevent Loxodonta africana going the same way as its evolutionary
cousins, the mammoths and mastodonts.

Heightening the conflict over ivory will be a range of other provocative
proposals from the southern African cartel. All but South Africa want to
relax a long-standing ban on commercial trade in leopard skins, for instance,
while Namibia and Zimbabwe are trying to downlist the cheetah. Four of the
countries want to reopen trade in various bodily parts of the endangered
Cape pangolin, an anteater whose scales are used in traditional Chinese
medicine and whose flesh is considered a delicacy in many parts of Africa.
The rhinoceros is likely to stir debate, too. Zimbabwe and South Africa
are pressing for a relaxation of the current trade ban on rhino horn, arguing
that their own rhinoceros populations are now secure enough to be downlisted
to Appendix 2. Both countries have built up large stockpiles of rhino horn
as a result of dehorning programmes aimed at deterring poachers. Now they
would like to sell them off.

Behind all these proposals is a single, simple philosophy: African wildlife,
if it is to survive in the long run, must pay its way. And for the proponents
of this philosophy the elephant has taken on symbolic value in the struggle
to put it into practice. Thus, conservationists in Zimbabwe talk of ‘farming’
their elephant herds as a ‘sustainable resource’, harvesting not only tusks
but hides and meat, too. The revenue so generated, they argue – which could
run into several million dollars per year – could be ploughed back into
conservation. By contrast, countries such as Kenya see tourism, rather
than trade, as the key to saving Africa’s large mammals.

This clash of ideas is born of a long-standing paradox. While successive
waves of poaching in the 1970s and 1980s forced countless elephant populations
in central and eastern Africa to the brink of extinction, elephants in Zimbabwe
and South Africa continued to multiply inside well-protected national parks.
So much so, in fact, that they soon became a threat to the very habitat
that sustains them. In the Hwange National Park, home to most of Zimbabwe’s
elephants since the late 1960s, annual culls designed to reduce pressure
on vegetation have since become the norm.

When CITES last grappled with the paradox, in 1989, the need to halt
poaching prevailed. But since then pressure has grown for trade to be resumed.
One reason, say western pressure groups such as Greenpeace and the Environmental
Investigation Agency (EIA), is that Zimbabwe is culling more elephants than
ever before and is thus building up an ever larger stockpile of ivory it
cannot sell. Activists and the public alike have long challenged Zimbabwe’s
policy of culling elephants, and in the run-up to this year’s CITES meeting
their opposition has deepened. Anger erupted in January when it emerged
that Zimbabwe plans to shoot as many as 5000 elephants a year for the next
14 years.

The EIA immediately branded these culls as the ‘largest state-sanctioned
kill of elephants in history’. But wildlife scientists in Zimbabwe insist
they are only doing what is necessary to prevent wholesale destruction of
vegetation. The country’s elephant population has doubled since the mid-1980s,
they claim, and now stands at 68 000 animals, about 25 000 more than its
scrublands can support. The conservation activists say Zimbabwe’s scientists
have got their sums wrong. The figure of 68 000, they charge, includes thousands
of immigrant elephants from Botswana and Mozambique, which have moved into
Zimbabwe to take advantage of watering holes and the space created by previous
culls. Zimbabwe’s scientists reject this notion, arguing that their figures
are based on simultaneous counts of elephants on both sides of the border.
They also insist that their aerial counting methods are no different from
those used by wildlife scientists in the US, Australia and Kenya , and that
a panel of experts sent by CITES is satisfied with their data.

Zimbabwe’s sympathisers say the country has simply become a victim of
its own success in protecting elephants. Yet this defence is unlikely
to quell accusations in Kyoto that its wildlife experts have failed to
question their figures because they strengthen Zimbabwe’s case in the ivory
debate. Nor is the scepticism confined to pressure groups. Iain Douglas-Hamilton,
who has spent a lifetime surveying and studying elephants in eastern Africa,
doubts that the animals can reproduce fast enough to generate the kind of
population increase Zimbabwe claims has taken place in its Hwange National
Park in recent years.

But whatever their doubts about Zimbabwe’s numbers, most elephant specialists
view culling and the ivory trade as two separate issues. ‘Culling is a purely
internal affair, but the effects of the ivory trade go well beyond national
borders,’ says Stephen Cobb, of the African Elephant Conservation Coordinating
Group, based in Oxford. Moreover, rows over numbers are nothing new to the
ivory imbroglio. It was to dispel confusion about the impact of ivory poaching
on elephant numbers in the 1980s that Douglas-Hamilton and others set up
the African Elephant Database at the head-quarters of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1986. The figures compiled there suggest
that Africa’s elephant population crashed from 1.3 million in 1979 to 609
000 in 1989. But – as all elephant conservationists readily acknowledge
– these numbers are at best estimates, and since they were first published,
they have proved an abiding source of conflict between opposing factions
in the ivory debate.

Today, wildlife specialists are becoming increasingly reluctant even
to estimate how many elephants are left in Africa. At best, says Cobb, the
data are ‘spotty’. Trusted figures exist for the elephant populations of
Tanzania (52 400) and Kenya (19 058), for example, but the numbers quoted
by the governments of Angola and Mozambique are wholly unreliable, he says.
For the Sudan and Somalia, moreover, there are no data at all. Last year
the World Conservation Union stopped publishing an overall figure for Africa’s
elephant population. ‘It was becoming a joke,’ says one of its conservation
officers.

The emerging caution over numbers is perhaps only to be expected, given
the enormity of the task of monitoring a species that is dispersed across
a third of Africa. The scope for error and dispute is magnified by confusion
over the elephant’s migratory habits and the fact that about 40 per cent
of African elephants are forest-dwellers that cannot be seen from the air.
Limited resources (aerial surveys cost about $200 per hour), political instability
and civil war only make matters worse.

Regardless of their differences over elephant numbers and conservation
policy, however, there is one thing on which all wildlife specialists agree:
ivory trade, or no ivory trade the Africa elephant faces a difficult future.
Africa’s human population is expected to double over the next two decades,
putting increasing pressure on the elephant’s habitats. Mustafa Tolba,
director of the UNEP, issued a bleak statement last month warning that
a huge injection of foreign aid ‘will be needed to keep herds safe’ as growing
numbers of people vie for land and resources. The looming habitat crisis
is nowhere more evident than in Rwanda.

The human population there is predicted to expand from 7.5 million to
15.6 million over the next 20 years, putting enormous pressure on the 10
per cent of land currently set aside for conservation, and in which the
country’s 100 or so surviving elephants are now confined.

And if the elephant loses its habitats, of course, so will Africa’s
other large mammals. A recent survey of the roan antelope, whose listing
in Appendix 2 is to be challenged in Kyoto, concludes reassuringly that
the animal is not yet in danger. It adds, however, that if current human
demographic and economic trends in Africa go unchecked, the antelope ‘and
almost all other large African mammals’ are likely to be extinct within
a century.

In Kyoto, mounting gloom about habitat loss is likely to be seized on
by Zimbabwe and its allies as further evidence of the need to resume trade
in ivory. Not only would trade generate money for protecting parks against
human encroachment, they will argue, but it would increase their economic
value to communities that might otherwise destroy them. Supporters of the
ivory ban will instead hold up tourism and international aid as the only
safe sources of money for protecting habitats.

An emergency blueprint for elephant survival that could form the basis
of an international aid package was unveiled last month at an international
meeting in Nairobi on elephant conservation. Drawn up by Cobb and his colleagues,
the plan comprises 33 separate conservation programmes, one for each African
nation with elephants to protect. Its total cost, as estimated by the nations
themselves, is $305 million. Uganda, for instance, says it needs $8.8
million to save its remaining 1910 elephants from extinction, while war-torn
Mozambique says that it will need $15.46 million dollars to rebuild its
conservation infrastructure if and when peace returns.

Overall, about a quarter of the aid money will be spent on managing
and protecting parks, says Cobb, while about 20 per cent will go on research
and surveys. Much of the remainder will be spent on rural development, wildlife
institutions and public awareness.

Tolba made it clear in Nairobi that it is the industrialised world which
will have to foot the bill. His warning was the blunt one which has come
to dominate the run-up to the Earth Summit meeting due to be held in Brazil
in June: if the rich countries of the North are serious about curing the
world’s environmental ills, they must back up their prescriptions with the
money to buy the medicine.

When it comes to saving Africa’s elephants, just how eager will potential
donors be to put up the cash when they see Zimbabwe shooting elephants in
their thousands? ‘Some organisations may find it unpalatable,’ admits Cobb,
‘but the major donors won’t be inhibited.’ He believes that implementing
the aid package would greatly reduce the need to raise money from ivory.

But why not have both trade and aid? After all, what Zimbabwe and its
allies are seeking is not an ivory free-for-all, but tightly regulated trade.
‘Too risky’ is the response of most conservation organisations, who point
out that the mere possibility of a relaxation of the ban has sent the price
of ivory on the black market soaring in recent months. There is striking
unanimity about what the main obstacle is to controlled trade: verification.
As yet there is no easy way to distinguish between poached ivory from, say,
Kenya and material removed from elephants culled in southern Africa. Moreover,
Japan – where vast amounts of illicit ivory were passed off as legal during
the 1980s – still has no system for controlling ivory imports.

In an attempt to dispel these worries, Zimbabwe and its allies will
highlight in Kyoto recent progress made by South African researchers towards
an ivory ‘fingerprinting’ technique. The method involves measuring the relative
abundances in a tusk of the atomic isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and strontium
and then matching the resulting isotope ‘fingerprint’ to one from a tusk
of known geographical origins. A similar method can be used for rhino horn
(see ‘Can we end rhino poaching?’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 5 October 1991). On paper,
the method is a trader’s dream. Yet, as supporters of the ivory ban are
quick to point out, it is far from ready for commercial application and,
even when it is ready, they say, it is likely to be expensive, perhaps as
much as $200 per tusk.

Jean-Patrick le Duc, of the CITES secretariat, believes that Zimbabwe
has at best a ‘small but legitimate’ chance of seeing its proposal approved.
Yet there is growing concern among wildlife conservationists that the southern
African countries must not leave Kyoto empty handed lest they decide to
break away from CITES. Already, Zimbabwe believes CITES is out of touch
with the views of the majority of conservationists on the policy of ‘sustainable
utilisation’ of wildlife. The smart money, therefore, is on a diplomatic
compromise, such as the reopening of trade in hides and meat from elephants
culled in southern Africa, but not trade in ivory. There is belief among
conservation organisations that this would not put the elephants of eastern
and central Africa in jeopardy. ‘No one ever shot an African elephant for
its hide,’ says Simon Lyster, a conservation officer with the World Wide
Fund for Nature.

How the votes swing on other proposals, particularly the request to
downlist the leopard, will also influence the reactions of the southern
African countries. At present the leopard is listed on Appendix 1, and CITES
permits only a few hundred skins – largely the by-products of legal trophy
hunting – to leave Africa each year. Commercial trade in leopard skins is
made virtually impossible by the fact that no more than two skins may be
taken out of a country at any one time (it takes six to make a coat). Loosening
such restrictions, argue the southern African countries, would increase
the value of leopards to trophy-hunting tourists, and to the many landowners
who routinely shoot the cat to safeguard their livestock. But anti-fur campaigners
are not convinced. They fear the move could trigger a dangerous increase
in demand for spotted cat skins, at least in countries where furs are still
popular.

Although the leopard populations of southern Africa are believed to
be stable or expanding, elsewhere the cat is in decline. Computer models,
combined with limited data collected on the ground, suggest that between
100 000 and 700 000 leopards currently live in Africa. ‘The leopard is certainly
not threatened with extinction due to trade and therefore has no place being
on Appendix 1,’ says Peter Jackson, a cat specialist with the World Conservation
Union; while ‘scaremongering’ is how Steve Broad, of TRAFFIC, the organisation
that monitors trade in animal products, des-cribes some of the hostility
to the proposal. ‘Demand for spotted cat skins has virtually disappeared,’
he says.

However, other conservation organisations, the WWF included, are less
sanguine and believe that lifting the ban could result in widespread poaching
of other spotted cats, such as the cheetah and jaguar.

The cheetah is thought to be in a particularly perilous position. Its
total population in the wild is believed to have fallen by about a half
over the last two decades and now stands at between 5000 and 12 000 animals.
Loss of habitat and pressure from hostile farmers are mainly to blame for
the decline, says Karen Laurenson, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge
who studies cheetahs in southern Africa. Some geneticists fear that the
animal’s position is all the more precarious because of an earlier brush
with near-extinction between one and two million years ago. But their theory
– that this episode has left the animal genetically impoverished and prone
to certain diseases – remains highly controversial.

The request to downlist the cheetah is expected to be thrown out in
Kyoto, as is the proposal to reopen trade in rhino horn. But this will not
stop Zimbabwe and its allies going to the meeting with the aim of winning
converts to their own brand of conservation. Their frustration at what they
consider to be the West’s overly protective attitudes towards African wildlife
is signalled by a radical proposal on the herring. In the past, CITES has
offered protection exclusively to rare animals and plants, but this year
Zimbabwe and three other African countries want to list the herring – a
commercially exploited but far from rare species – on the convention’s Appendix
1. Herring stocks have recovered since they crashed due to overfishing in
the mid-1970s, and no one believes the fish is in danger of extinction.
The proposal is therefore unlikely to succeed in Kyoto, though its political
message will be clear.

A range of other unorthodox proposals on this year’s agenda, all designed
to curb exploitation of forests and fisheries, suggests that Zimbabwe is
not alone in wanting to steer CITES in a new direction . If approved, these
measures could mark a turning point for CITES, helping to take the treaty
‘beyond the boundaries of the rare and exotic’, says Amie Brautigan, of
the World Conservation Union. In her mind they serve to crystallise an important
philosophical question: ‘Is the ultimate goal of CITES to close down international
trade in wildlife or to establish effective management of all globally threatened
²õ±è±ð³¦¾±±ð²õ?’

Mary Cole is a freelance writer based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Christopher
Joyce is a science writer based in Washington DC who specialises in life
sciences and the environment.

* * *

1: Fishing for jumbo numbers

The usual way to take a census of elephants from the air is to count
all the animals that lie along a set of ‘transects’, imaginary lines that
crisscross the survey area. The first step is to select a survey area that
will yield a precise estimate of the total population, preferably one with
a relatively high density of elephants. Elephants are seldom evenly distributed,
and either a preliminary flight over the area or a rough ground survey are
usually necessary to stratify different areas according to their elephant
densities.

‘With limited time and money there is little point in intensively sampling
known low-density areas,’ says Deborah Gibson, a consultant ecologist who
previously worked in Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks.

Next, a baseline is drawn on a map, parallel to a major feature such
as a river. Counting animals along the line of the river itself may produce
biased results as they tend to gather at river banks at certain times of
the day. The first transect is drawn perpendicular to the baseline, through
a randomly placed point. The other transects are then placed parallel to
the first transect, and at equal distances. The higher the estimated density
of elephants in the area, the more transects are needed.

The observers fly along the transect lines, counting animals in strips
100 to 200 metres wide. In Botswana, these strips are marked out by fishing
rods clamped to the plane’s struts, two observers counting the game between
the struts. Pilots have recently started using satellite naivigation equipment
to help them keep on course.

In Zimbabwe, counts are done in the dry season, from late August through
to October, when most trees are leafless and animals more visible. ‘It is
a very boring, tedious and tiring job and it is possible to miss game,’
says one observer. Moreover, resources are limited. It takes seven days
to sample elephants in just 7 per cent of the 15 000 square kilometres of
the Hwange National Park.

Where it is too hilly for transect counts from winged aircraft, block
counts from a helicopter are done instead. Once again the whole area is
first stratified according to elephant densities. Each stratum is then divided
into small blocks, and a number of these are randomly selected. Observers
fly over these blocks many times, counting the elephants within them.

When aerial counts began in Zimbabwe in 1967, observers would simply
try to count every elephant they could see. As a result, the counts yielded
estimates that were about one-third of the true population. The observers
were searching so much ground that they were missing many animals. Today’s
methods, introduced in 1979, give more accurate estimates.

Every year conservationists in Zimbabwe still do ground surveys by going
to water holes and counting the elephants that visit. National parks scientists
argue that such counts are a waste of time because there is no guarantee
that every animal will visit the waterholes, while some animals may be counted
twice. Aerial photographs are impractical for counting elephants and video
cameras do not have a fine enough resolution.

Counting forest-dwelling elephants is a greater challenge still as it
cannot be done from the air. The most effective method requires certain
detective skills. As part of wider research into elephant behaviour in the
rainforests of Gabon, Richard Barnes, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge,
and his colleagues have perfected the art of ‘counting by dung’. Their approach
is to number all the elephant dunghills in a selected area of forest, aging
each one according to its state of decay. By combining this information
with a knowledge of how often the local elephants defecate, the researchers
can then estimate how many elephants live in the area. The diametres of
the dunghills even give clues as to the elephants’ sizes, and hence ages.

* * *

2: CITES challenged by the plight of the mahogany

In a bid to stem destruction of the world’s forests, some delegates
to this year’s CITES conference will try to ban all commercial trade in
mahogany.

No hardwood trees of commercial significance have ever been listed under
CITES, which was designed primarily to protect animals and rare plants.
So the attempt next week by the US and Costa Rica to list the American
mahogany, whose timber has been widely traded for five centuries, will
spark opposition.

At issue are three species of Swietenia, all commonly known as mahogany
and native to tropical South America. The US, Europe and Japan are the principal
importers; Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay are the largest producers.
It is a highly workable and beautiful wood valued for furniture, musical
instruments and for veneers.

According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, most efforts to grow
plantations of mahogany in South America and Asia have failed. A parasite,
the moth larvae of the shoot-borer, causes the tree to branch, making it
useless as timber. The demand for wild trees remains high. Numbers of one
species, S. mahagoni, are now so low that the tree suffers ‘severe genetic
erosion’, says the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The gene stock of the most
traded species, S. macrophylla, is believed to be at risk, too. Much of
the mahogany cut from this species is traded illegally.

The International Hardwood Products Association in the US, however,
says mahogany is not threatened. Wendy Baer, the group’s president, blames
agriculture in Latin America, not logging, for depleting the tree. The American
position is also under attack from the US government’s own Forest Service
which argues that local practices such as poor land use, not international
trade, are the problem.

The hardwood trade association will not, however, be opposing the proposed
ban on trade in carribbean mahogany. Being virtually extinct, the tree is
no longer traded, so some consider this a somewhat vain stance. But Bruce
McBryde, director of the US delegation to CITES, thinks the response is
significant: it proves, he says, that the timber trade is willing to take
CITES seriously.

Meanwhile, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a pressure group in
Washington DC, quotes Bolivian scientists who say that mahogany rarely regenerates
naturally in the forest without assistance. ‘Market forces will not protect
indigenous mahogany populations,’ concludes the council’s Faith Campbell.
The US imported over 116 000 cubic metres of mahogany in 1989. Europe bought
a similar amount and Japan slightly less.

The proposal on mahogany is all the more controversial because it challenges
CITES itself. According to Stephen Hubbell, a tropical ecologist at Princeton
University in New Jersey, ‘CITES is being used as a device to make countries
more responsible in their logging practices.’ This in turn, he says, may
turn some against the convention.

Another hardwood scheduled for discussion in Kyoto is Brazilian rosewood,
Dalbergia nigra. Brazil wants to give the tree, endemic to its almost completely
deforested Atlantic coastal forests, the highest level of protection. One
of the rarest and most expensive of hardwoods in trade is afrormosia, Pericopsis
elata, found mainly in areas of central and western Africa. Great Britain
and Denmark would like to list it under Appendix 2 to restrict trade and
monitor its numbers. The Netherlands and Denmark, meanwhile, are proposing
to list three species of heavily cut tropical hardwoods from Southeast Asia
on Appendix 2: Intsia acuminata, I. bijuga and I. palembanica.

But the unorthodox proposals on this year’s CITES agenda are not confined
to the timber trade. Commercial fisheries are also in the dock, thanks to
a proposal by Sweden to list the Atlantic bluefin tuna on Appendix 1. Fetching
up to $60 per kilo at the dock, the bluefin is a prized catch in New England
that is often sold to Japanese buyers. People who fish for sport also keep
the fish because of its high value.

Mary Donnelly, a biologist at the Center for Marine Conservation in
Washington DC, says that the spawning population of is probably 10 per cent
of what it was 20 years ago. Although New England fishermen are restricted
to an annual quota of 2660 tonnes, she says, too many small fish are being
caught.

Christopher Joyce