IVORY wars resumed this week amid calls to abandon an internationally sanctioned plan to sell 60 tonnes of elephant ivory from government stockpiles in southern Africa later this year. There are growing fears that the sale of tusks from some 6000 African elephants will trigger an upsurge in poaching across the continent, by allowing traders to launder illegal ivory.
International trade in ivory has been outlawed since 1989. But two years ago, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) provisionally approved the sale of ivory accumulated from elephants that died naturally and official culls in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. To give the official go-ahead, CITES experts must be persuaded that suitable systems for monitoring poaching and illegal ivory trading are in place. At a CITES meeting in Geneva this week, the southern African countries hope to get that official green light to sell their ivory stocks as early as May.
But last week, seven central and east African nations, headed by Kenya, asked CITES to call off the sale. Documents prepared for the meeting by the CITES secretariat and seen by 快猫短视频 reveal that there are still huge loopholes in the policing system. These gaps could allow increased poaching of elephants and a rise in illegal ivory trading to pass unnoticed.
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The secretariat says that a network CITES set up six years ago to monitor poaching and elephant demographics has not yet gathered accurate enough statistics through the reporting systems of the nations involved. And it warns that China and Japan, two countries keen to buy the southern African ivory, cannot track ivory sales. Six tonnes of ivory seized in Singapore two years ago was destined for Japan, where there is a large network of ivory carvers and traders, most of whom are not registered with the government.
Kenya also claims that South Africa has failed to prove that none of its stockpiled tusks came from poaching, and that few African states are supplying up-to-date mortality data for elephants, which CITES would need to spot upsurges in poaching. Meanwhile, TRAFFIC, the UN-backed body that tracks trade in wildlife products, accuses several other countries, including Senegal and Nigeria, of acting as staging posts for ivory en route for world markets. 鈥淚vory is even illegally on sale in the departure lounge of Lagos international airport, which is government property,鈥� it said in a statement in December.
The UK is also in the firing line. The US-based International Fund for Animal Welfare last week claimed the country is a hub for the illegal ivory trade. It claims British antiques traders are selling ivory products without the paperwork to show that they are genuine antiques, and new ivory is being carved to look old.
Some environmentalists back the proposed one-off ivory sale, as a prelude to a resumption of legal international trade. They believe that giving nations a financial incentive to protect and 鈥渉arvest鈥� their elephants is the best route to long-term conservation. They also point out that banning international ivory trade has harmed efforts to conserve other animals, such as hippos. Poaching of hippos in central Africa for their tooth ivory has increased more than fivefold since 1989 (快猫短视频, 6 September 2003, p 9).
Economists are just as divided over whether legal ivory sales will stimulate or discourage illegal trade. The sale should lower prices and reduce the incentive to poach. But equally it could stimulate poaching by making it easy for traders to launder illegal ivory, and boost demand for it by reducing the stigma attached to owning ivory. When several southern African nations sold official stocks in a one-off sale in 1999, Kenya, which opposed the sale, claimed this stimulated poaching within its borders.
Under CITES rules, money raised in the 1999 sale should have gone into conservation. But Kenya is claiming this week that none of the states taking part in that sale has accounted properly for the $5 million they raised.