AR-News: Ivory trade threatens elephants in Grancophone Africa

Wed Jun 30 00:10:59 EDT 2004

6/28/2004 12:24:00 PM

PARIS, Jun 28, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Recent
efforts to ease the ivory trade ban have furthered eroded Africa's already
decimated elephant population, with conservation efforts in Francophone West
Africa under particular threat, experts in Paris said Monday. 

The grim prognosis comes during a two-day meeting of African wildlife
experts looking for ways to crack down on elephant poaching and the illegal
ivory trade -- which is closely linked to the legal one. 

"There's been a resurgence in demand for ivory lately, particularly from
Japan and the Far East," said Bill Clark, an African elephant expert, in an
interview. "And this has been correlated with an increase in poaching." 

Just 30 years ago, an estimated 1.3 million elephants roamed the African
continent. Today, conservationists place their number at 300,000 and
declining. 

Some of the hardest hit countries are cashed-strapped ones in Western
Africa, which count only dozens, or at most hundreds of elephants. Senegal,
for example, has only about 35 elephants left.

The Paris conference, gathering experts from 14 Francophone African
countries, comes ahead of a international meeting on ivory trade, scheduled
in Bangkok in October. 

"CITES is threatened to disappear, or to become completely discredited,"
French elephant expert, Pierre Pfeffer, told Liberation newspaper referring
to the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. 

A CITES decision two years ago to ease a total, 13-year-old ban on the ivory
trade and resurgent demands for ivory from the Far East pose new threats to
Africa's remaining elephants, conservationists like Pfeffer say. 

The eased restrictions originally targeted only South Africa, Zimbabwe,
Botswana and Namibia, which were allowed one-time sales of their ivory
stockpiles. Elephant populations in all three countries are considered
healthy. 

But many environmentalists claim eased restrictions allow illegal trade in
ivory to flourish elsewhere. 

"The legal trade serves as a vehicle for the illegal trade," said Clark, who
supports banning all trade in ivory. "It's impossible to tell whether a
piece of ivory had a legal or illegal origin once it's in a retail shop in
Tokyo or elsewhere." 

Francophone African countries face particular problems in wildlife
conservation. Not only do they count among Africa's poorest nations, but
they also often get a small slice of funding from a mostly English-speaking
international conservation movement. 

The problems often amount to a simple communications gap, experts say: Many
local wildlife directors cannot write grant proposals in English. Many
international donors have a poor command of French. 

As a result, the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare,
which is co-hosting the Paris meeting alongside a French conservation group,
will be soliciting African grant applications in French. 

More serious are reports that terrorist groups are eyeing the ivory trade as
a rich new source of illegal revenue -- alongside diamonds, arms and timber.
Kenya wildlife officers, for example, recently found links between a slain
poacher and Somali warlord and suspected terrorist sympathizer, Mohammed
Saeed Hirsi. 

"A couple of years ago, world banking authorities shut down Swiss banks
accounts of these people," Clark said. 

"But they've got operations to maintain, they've got people to pay in their
gangs. And Kenya is a neighboring country and very convenient -- with lots
of ivory and rhinoceros horns. So they've been sending gangs from Somalia to
Kenya. Repeatedly."

United Press International     ELIZABETH BRYANT, United Press International

_______________________

Barry Kent MacKay
Canadian Representative 
Animal Protection Institute 
www.api4animals.org  