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   Ivory Trade by Mary Huber
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The United Nations banned world trade in ivory over 20 years ago in a bid to help save the African elephants from extinction. The ban helped to halt the rapid decline of African elephants at the hands of poachers. Before the ban, poachers slaughtered entire herds of magnificent ivory-bearing elephants in game reserves across Africa.  In some places, the poachers killed off the local elephant populations completely, creating a devastating gap in the ecosystem and the tourist trade. Tourists on safari in Africa want to see elephants. Game reserves without elephants do not attract the sort of high-spending visitor numbers that help lift whole communities out of poverty and into sustainable co-existence with the wildlife around them.


Between 1979 and 1989, poachers effectively wiped half of Africa’s 1.3 million elephants off the map. Since then, the ban on trade in ivory in 1990 has helped slow the slaughter but it has not stopped it. Poaching is once again at record levels. The ivory trade is again threatening the survival of Africa’s elephants.

Why is this so? It is because the ban on the trade in ivory has never been absolutely total. Various countries negotiated specific exemptions to the ban at various times. In 1997, for example, certain southern African countries negotiated a one-time sale of their ivory stocks to Japan. Most of these stocks came from managed culls of elephant herds in over-populated game reserves. The African countries used the evidence of their managed approach to maintaining elephant herds to provide the basis for the sale. A managed trade in ivory, they argue, helps bring in revenue to rural areas in Africa that desperately need it. Maintaining elephant herds for safari visitors, while selling off ivory through culling, seems to make economic sense. Since the Japan deal, China too has obtained approved status for buying stockpiles of ivory.

However, all of this ignores the impact of poaching. Because buyers in Asia can once again purchase ivory legally, poachers have an incentive to mass slaughter elephants to sell off as much ivory as possible in the time period permitted. Of course, every sale of poached ivory is illegal. But the poachers are adept at making it seem to the buyer that the ivory comes from a legitimate, managed cull of elephants. As a result, conservation groups say that poaching and the illegal ivory trade are at their highest levels since 1989. Poachers account for somewhere between 20,000 to 60,000 elephant deaths a year. And the number is rising. At this rate, elephants will vanish from the face of Africa in all but the most protected game reserves in the handful of countries which enforce policies around elephant culls.

And ivory has never been so valuable as it is today. In the international markets, the price of ivory rises year on year. In 2004, a kilogramme of ivory was worth as much as $200. Five years later, the price is 30 times higher at almost $6,000. Prices next year are certain to be even higher. The demand for ivory is rising in all the traditional markets for ivory products – especially those of the Middle East and Asia. As prices rise, the poachers kill more and more elephants to make massive profits. In 2009, poachers are likely to eliminate 10% of Africa’s remaining elephant population. In 2010, the figure is likely to rise to 20% as the impact of the shrinking elephant population starts to show.

Recent seizures of elephant tusks reveal the true extent of the global problem. Working together, the police forces of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan together seized thousands of tusks in a series of coordinated raids. But despite these efforts, the international trade in illegal ivory continues to thrive. Conservationists using new techniques in DNA mapping are beginning to discover why.

Professor Sam Wasser and his team at the University of Washington Centre for Conservation Biology in the USA have developed a way of recording elephant DNA to pinpoint the origin of every tusk of ivory that comes on sale.  Volunteers across Africa collect samples of elephant dung from which the University of Washington team identifies specific individual elephant’s DNA. Professor Wasser’s team uses this evidence to build up a map showing the DNA characteristics of different elephant populations in every part of Africa. When the project started, the conservationists expected the DNA map to show that illegal ivory came out of a vast variety of sources across Africa. They expected this because everyone at that time believed poachers operated in small gangs at a very local level based on access to poorly policed game parks. The evidence of the DNA map shows an entirely different reality.

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Glossary

Extinction (n)
when an animal or plant ceases to exist.

Poacher (n)
someone who illegally kills animals for money.

Exemption (n)
permission to ignore a law or rule.

Cull (n)
planned killing in order to keep numbers of animals down.
  Last Updated ( Wednesday, 10 February 2010 11:38 )