Poaching of 55 elephants daily leaves extinction a decade away

As world leaders and conservationists descended on London last week for the Illegal Wildlife Trafficking Conference, the burning question in their minds was: How can trade in ivory, especially in Asian countries be contained?

The fear is that Africa’s elephants could go the way of dinosaurs. Some 20,000 jumbos are killed each year — 55 every single day — mostly for the illegal ivory trade.

The war on the illicit trade was dealt a blow on February 4, when ivory researcher Esmond Martin, who had authored several investigative reports on rhino and ivory smuggling in Kenya and the trade in China, Vietnam, and Laos, was found murdered in his Karen home in Nairobi.

Speaking at the conference, First Lady Margaret Kenyatta said Kenya has recorded a significant decline in poaching due to its enhanced wildlife law enforcement efforts and the government’s proactive anti-poaching measures.

“We have revamped and improved training and equipped Kenya Wildlife Service ranger forces that continuously evict poacher elements from the parks,” she said.

The statistics make for gloomy reading, though. The overall number of elephants has declined by about one third over the last decade. Many elephants now live in small and isolated populations. And should the current trends persist, elephants will be wiped out in the next decade.

Data from World Wide Fund for Nature shows that African elephants numbered three to five million in the last century. However, WWF says, their populations were severely reduced to its current levels because of hunting.

In the 1980s, WWF estimates that 100,000 elephants were killed each year, and up to 80 per cent of herds were lost in some regions. In recent years, growing demand for ivory, particularly from Asia, has led to a surge in poaching.

Elephant populations — especially in southern and eastern Africa, which once showed promising signs of recovery — could be at risk due to the recent surge in poaching for the illegal ivory trade. Habitat loss and fragmentation and human-elephant conflict have also been blamed for the decline by WWF.

LEADING TRANSIT ROUTE

Kenya has been identified in various researches as one of the leading transit routes for smuggling ivory out of Africa, with several incidents of ivory seizures and recovery of wildlife carcasses in recent times.

According to KWS, elephant population in early 1970s was about 167,000, but in five decades, it has plummeted to slightly more than 35,000. The Central Africa Republic is the hardest-hit part of the continent, with regional elephant population declining by 64 per cent in a decade, according to the report.

In July 2016, a report showed that Vietnam had emerged as one of the world’s biggest markets for the illegal ivory trade.

The report, titled ‘Vietnam’s illegal ivory trade threatens African elephants’, said no other country in the world is known to be as active in both illegal imports of new raw tusks and illegal exports of the final ivory products.

Ivory researchers Lucy Vigne and Esmond Martin found that the overwhelming majority of raw tusks sold in wholesale in Vietnam are smuggled from Africa, with Mombasa port popping up as the major transit point in the region.

The two researchers who had set out for the study found out the number of items up for sale had risen by over six times from 2008 to 2015.

In total, Vigne and Martin found a whopping 242 open outlets, with 16,099 ivory items on display available for retail sales in Ho Chi Minh city, Buon Ma Thuot town, Hanoi and surrounding villages.

Of these items, 9,893 (61 per cent) were in one of the Northern villages that had not been counted before, with most objects being pendants and small items like jewelry.

This was in contrast to 2,444 items counted in a report published in 2008 by another ivory researcher, Dan Stiles, who also found out that most tusks had originated from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

The research was carried out between November 23 and December 14, 2015. It showed that two thirds of ivory were leaving through the ports of Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, going to China and Vietnam.

The Chinese government announced in 2015 that it would phase out the legal ivory trade. This was followed by the reduction of the number of licensed ivory factories from 37 in 2014 to 34 in 2015, and the number of licensed retail outlets from 145 to 130.

Public awareness on the plight of the elephant has been steadily increasing in China, with bloody pictures on the internet and WeChat of poached elephants with tusks hacked out.

And since the ban was looming large, ivory dealers who spoke with researchers thought that their president was being pressurised to close down the country’s legal ivory trade.

They hoped there would not be a sudden ban but a gradual phasing out of ivory. Some hoped the government would buy tusks from private people as a way of compensation, including from Hong Kong traders, to help stop the trade.

Researchers Vigne and Martin would later shift their attention to South East Asian country Laos. They found that the town was becoming one of the fastest growing ivory markets in the world.

There, Chinese were now buying over 80 per cent of ivory in Laos, but the retail prices were lower than in China. They later drafted a report called, ‘The ivory trade of Laos: Now the fastest growing in the world’.

The report also noted most of the raw ivory comes from Africa by ship, in containers destined for Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

“Until recently, 90 per cent of large consignments would be moved directly to China. But nowadays much of the ivory is being diverted to Vientiane,” the 88-page report says.

Vigne and Martin did a survey in mid-November to December 2016. They collected data on the origin of ivory and trade routes into Laos.

According to them, the average wholesale price of raw ivory in Laos in 2013 had peaked to about $2,000 per kg (Sh201,896). But by late 2016, the average price had declined to $714 (Sh72,077) per kg.

The researchers found 81 retail outlets with ivory on sale, 40 of which were in the capital Vientiane. The least expensive item was $ 3 (Sh302) and the most expensive was a pair of polished tusks for $ 25,000 (Sh2,523,707).

In Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Chinese-owned shops had increased from three in 2013 to 35 in 2016.

MAJOR BLOW

In another report they released on October 2, this year, Vigne and Martin said the increased ivory in China from Myanmar could soon deal African elephants a major blow.

They compiled the report in late 2017 and titled it, ‘Myanmar’s Growing Illegal Ivory Trade with China’. In it, they found that the number of new ivory items for sale had grown exponentially.

“The number of new ivory items for sale in towns grew by 63 per cent in three years, and now accounts for over a third of the ivory seen in the country,” ivory trade specialist Lucy Vigne said.

She said Chinese visitors smuggled worked ivory from Mong La back home, with little concern about getting caught.

“This ivory has often come up the Mekong River into the lawless eastern periphery of Myanmar, where it is sold in retail and in bulk. The wholesale price for African raw ivory in late 2017 in the Golden Triangle region has remained stable at about $770 to $800 per kg since late 2015,” Vigne said.

Recent and previous studies are now what baffle governments, NGOs and decision-makers who gathered in London for the Illegal Wildlife Trafficking Conference between October 11-12.

Conservationists are now banking their hopes on the outcomes of the meeting to save elephants.

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Delay in Hong Kong’s ivory ban endangers elephants and is ‘legally unnecessary’

China implemented a full ivory ban at the end of 2017, while Hong Kong announced it would only completely phase out domestic ivory trade by 2021. This mismatch in the implementation of the bans could be shifting the ivory trade to Hong Kong, researchers say in a new paper.

In addition to concerns about a growing ivory market in Hong Kong, the closure of China’s markets, combined with increased enforcement there, is also driving ivory to growing markets like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

An immediate ban of the ivory trade in Hong Kong is technically possible, and the delay to 2021 is “legally unnecessary,” a legal expert says.

In December 2016, China and Hong Kong, two of the world’s major ivory markets, announced their commitment to shut down all domestic ivory trade. China implemented a full ban at the end of 2017, making it illegal to sell or process ivory in the country. Hong Kong announced it would completely phase out the domestic ivory trade by 2021, giving traders a five-year grace period to sell off their remaining ivory.

This mismatch in the implementation of the bans could be shifting the trade to Hong Kong, a team of conservationists say in a new letter published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

“The worry here is that the continued legal market in Hong Kong serves as an opportunity for ivory traders to launder illegal ivory derived from recently killed elephants,” lead author Luke Gibson, an associate professor at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, told Mongabay.

A Kenyan ranger guards poached elephant tusks in preparation for the destruction of 105 tons of ivory and a ton of rhino horn in April. Image by Mwangi Kirubi via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is a global hub for both the legal and illegal wildlife trade. It is also a party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which banned the international trade in elephant ivory in 1989. This means that only ivory that comes from elephants killed before 1989 can be legally sold in Hong Kong. However, recent radiocarbon dating studies of large ivory seizures as well as government-led operations have found that some ivory traders have been selling ivory derived from elephants killed after the 1989 ban.

Gibson and his colleagues found that between 1996 and 2017, seizures of major shipments of more than 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of ivory were sometimes intercepted in Hong Kong, and other times in mainland China. The authors aren’t sure why seizures in the two countries seem to be negatively correlated, but they are concerned that with China banning its ivory trade at the end of 2017, the trade will now largely shift to Hong Kong. This would continue to encourage the poaching of African elephants. In the past couple of months, for instance, nearly 90 elephants were reportedly killed by poachers in northern Botswana.

“Ivory traders everywhere will always do whatever they can to evade detection by law enforcement,” said co-author Alex Hofford, a wildlife campaigner with WildAid Hong Kong. “It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. If it closes down over here, up it pops over there.

“We encourage the Hong Kong government to look into finding new and innovative ways to further restrict domestic Hong Kong ivory trade ahead of the full ban on 31 December 2021 — which is over three long years away,” he said. “Judging by the recent news of the 87 elephants massacre[d] in Botswana, a lot of elephants can still be slaughtered in that time.”

Mary Rice, executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), who was not part of the paper, said large consignments of seized ivory were historically destined for markets in mainland China. While there is concern that the closure of China’s ivory markets, combined with increased enforcement there, could shift the trade to Hong Kong’s markets, it is also driving ivory to growing markets like Vietnam and Laos. These markets “cater predominantly for Chinese consumers who can no longer legally purchase ivory at home,” Rice said.

“Cambodia also now features regularly in seizure incidents,” she added. “Weak governance and enforcement in these countries facilitates the emergence of markets to fill the void created by China’s decision to ban ivory trade.”

Gibson and his colleagues, while applauding the Hong Kong government’s decision to phase out the ivory trade, urged a complete ban with immediate effect.

To possess and sell elephant ivory in Hong Kong, traders must have a license issued by the government. All currently held licenses will expire on Dec. 30, 2021.

To implement the ivory ban immediately, the government would have to cancel these licenses, Gibson said. While this is possible to do, Gibson said it was unlikely to happen because ivory traders had a strong political presence in Hong Kong.

Delaying the full ban to 2021 is “legally unnecessary,” said Amanda S. Whitfort, an associate law professor at the University of Hong Kong, whose husband, David Dudgeon, is a co-author of the recent letter.

“The right to private property under Articles 6 and 105 of the Hong Kong Basic Law is not absolute,” Whitfort said. “The government is permitted to take reasonable and rational action to restrict citizens’ free use of their property, including its sale, where restrictions are justified in the public interest. In this case, the government can make an extremely strong claim that the continued sale of ivory in Hong Kong compromises the legitimate societal interest in ending a trade that cannot be ethically or sustainably sourced.”

Whitfort said that since traders had not been asked to surrender their ivory to the government, “they may continue to keep it, exhibit it or even donate it. They simply may not sell it.”

“Those who have stockpiled pre-CITES ivory have had notice of the closure of the global ivory market for more than two decades, there is no legitimate need to allow them any more time,” she said. “Only after a total ban on the sale of all ivory has been implemented can Hong Kong begin to address the decades of harm our market has caused.

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