At the same time, three southern African countries – Zimbabwe, Namibia and the conference host country, South Africa – still want to open a legal trade in ivory.
Advertisement
– White rhino -Swaziland submitted a last-minute proposal that would allow it to sell its stockpile of around 330 kilograms (730 pounds) of rhino horns and thereafter 20 kilograms annually from legally and non-lethally harvested horns.
Ivory is particularly coveted in Asia where it is used for carving and jewelry. But the protection was weakened in 1997 and 2000 when populations in four countries (Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe) were down-listed to Appendix II (a less endangered status) to allow two sales of ivory stockpiles to Japan and China in 1999 and 2008.
“The future of the African elephant and rhino is far from secure as long as demand for their products exists”, Wakhugu said on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in NY.
It noted an estimated 71 percent increase in ivory smuggling out of Africa “while corresponding patterns are absent from natural mortality and alternative explanatory variables”.
Another focus for this CoP is the pangolin – the most illegally traded mammal in the world with more than a million taken from the wild in the past decade.
But activists fear this may exacerbate the current rhino poaching crisis and CITES has recommended that the controversial proposal be rejected.
Africa is divided over whether to sell the ivory of its elephants, whose continent-wide population has plummeted because of poaching. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article. At a market price of, say, US$300 per kilogram, that would yield a mere U$16.2 million.
“Cites must take a tough line”, by forcing Vietnam to swiftly prosecute traffickers and traders or face trade sanctions for all other regulated species, she noted. Sandwiched between Namibia and Zimbabwe, many of its elephants cross into their territories.
But in Kenya, where elephants can not be owned and where any hunting is forbidden, the animals are seen as a bigger draw for tourists wanting to see them in the wild. Lusseau and Lee found that the most the herd could sustainably yield was a maximum of 150 kilograms of ivory per year – a little more than the amount found in a single pair of adult tusks. This vote comes on the heels of newly released and comprehensive data from the Great Elephant Census, which corroborated a catastrophic decline in elephant numbers across Africa.
The number of Africa’s savannah elephants dropped by about 30 per cent from 2007 to 2014 – to 352,000 – because of poaching, according to a United Nations recent study.
Africa’s other species, the forest elephant, will need a century to recover from poaching because of its slow birth rate, and numbers around 70,000. 90% of Somalia’s elephant population was wiped out in just that one dry season and the Somali elephants lived as ghosts with the remaining elephant groups surviving in the inaccessible swamp-lands of Southern Somalia. Its proposal says elephant populations exceeding 0.5 per km have a detrimental impact on woodlands and other species. The proposal has been criticised by antique dealers, who say it will put them out of business.
Bizarrely, Muchinguri-Kashiri seems to lay the blame for a “local overabundance” of elephants in the Hwange ecosystem resulting in the extinction of “certain bird species” on the elephants themselves, even though she acknowledges the “overabundance” to be the outcome of the “artificial supply of water”, i.e. a matter of conservation management.
Advertisement
In this July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species.
