Richard Leakey

Lately, elephant poaching in Africa has been increasing at an alarming rate. Kenya, whose elephant population has – according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) – increased from 16,000 elephants before the 1989 CITES ban on ivory trade to the current 32,000 – has seen its fair share of this poaching. It is now becoming a big problem and we are likely to see a sharp decline in the population of the African elephant if poaching remains unchecked. But how did this sudden increase occur and how can we solve it?

First, this problem is not a problem of Kenya alone. It is happening all over Africa. Whereas the KWS blames the CITES-sanctioned one-off auction of ivory from southern African states to China and Japan for the sudden upsurge of poaching, there are indeed other factors that come into play. The upsurge in poaching is not a direct consequence of the auction although it did trigger the growth in demand.

What happened is that the auction made legal ivory available in the market and that was the danger. The sudden availability of a significant amount of ivory revitalized a market that had disappeared. Now, there is no way that legal ivory could satisfy demand in this enlarged market. Illegal ivory, consequently, found a new outlet and soon started fetching better prices at the source.

Although the influx on Chinese workers in Africa is also blamed for rising poaching, this is unlikely to be contributing significantly to the problem. The Chinese workers are lowly paid and thus they don’t have the large amounts of money required to buy ivory from poachers.

Far more important, there is quite a busy ivory market in China triggered by the one-off auction of Ivory last year. Twenty years ago ivory was not very affordable in China. Only a few rich people could buy. Today, China’s per capita income has been growing by about 8% per year. There are now tens of millions of Chinese people who can buy ivory. This is where the problem is.

In 1980s majority of these new buyers were young and did not know about the ivory crisis. The one-off sale however alerted this new market to the availability of ivory.

Poverty has also increased in Africa as the population grows faster than the economy. People are increasingly becoming desperate and are therefore getting more involved in poaching to put food on the table. The current drought in Kenya has made the situation even worse.

We also know that majority of African elephant range states have no effective policing mechanisms to contain this problem. in Kenya, the KWS has no money to fund any effective law enforcement that is required to contain poaching and the illegal ivory trade.

A solution needs to be found and the way forward is to try and get the total ban on ivory trade reinstated. Once the ban is reinstated, ivory disappears from the market. Possession of ivory becomes a crime. Policing thus gains some effectiveness. Furthermore, lack of a market will drive the price of raw ivory in Africa down.

People have asked me if KWS should repeat the public burning of ivory to make a statement, especially now that it is the 20-year anniversary of this event. I say it depends on how this is handled. Of course, we did raise some money back then, but the idea was new then. It is now an old idea and old ideas have to be handled carefully. It would however be a PR disaster for the KWS to sell the ivory to a third party.

In the old days, we created a fine force that was able to bring down the level of poaching until Kenya’s elephant population started increasing.  The situation is different today. Twenty years ago, elephant poaching was done by Somalis who were not very well equipped. Today, the poachers are mostly local people especially in the north of the country.

In the north, there are very many guns used primarily in cattle rustling – by both the rustlers and those protecting their cattle. These guns are now being used in poaching. This is worsened by KWS allowing the nomadic pastoralists into wildlife reserves especially during this drought. This is a big mistake. KWS should clear the reserves in order to get these guns away from elephants.

Until something is done, poaching will continue to escalate. The time to act is now.

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I am deeply concerned about the ongoing one-off ivory auction that started on 28 October in Namibia and ends on Wednesday, 6 November 2008 in South Africa.

I have spent many years looking at issues of elephant conservation and ivory trade and played a major role in successfully eliminating the massive ivory poaching that characterized what is considered the darkest period for African elephants in Kenya in the late 1980s, I believe that auctioning the ivory stockpiles would cause poaching to increase particularly in the central, eastern and western African elephant range states where poaching is not yet properly controlled.

Namibia auctioned its 9 tons of ivory on Tuesday, 28 October raising $1.2-million. Zimbabwe and Botswana have also auctioned their ivory to the exclusive Chinese and Japanese buyers making $480,000 and $1.1-million respectively. On 6 November, South Africa will auction the largest cache of ivory – 51 tons – to conclude this controversial sale. According to the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the parties to the auction, the funds generated from this sale will be channeled directly into conservation. I am skeptical and wonder if there is a way of knowing whether these funds will actually help conservation.

The entry of China into the legal trade is also a cause of concern for me. It is hard to believe that a country which in 2002 scored only 5.6 out of 100 points in the CITES Elephant Trade Information Systems (ETIS) ranking – which ranks countries on how effectively they tackle illegal ivory – could have scored 63 points this year. China has admitted loosing track of 120 tons of ivory from the government’s official stockpiles in the past 12 years.

Recently, Kenya saw the successful conviction of Chinese nationals accused of smuggling ivory that appears to have originated from 22 out of the 37 African elephant range states. The entry of China – the destination for most of the illegal ivory – is an ill advised move that will only serve to open up the illegal ivory markets.

Reports already indicate that poaching is increasing in most parts of Africa. The Kenya Wildlife Service – Kenya’s official wildlife authority – has reported that poaching is increasing in key elephant zones. Central and west Africa have also witnessed escalating poaching in recent times. The Democratic Republic of Congo, caught up in a complex civil strife, has become a haven for poachers.

Although CITES secretary-general Willem Wijnstekers says that southern African states have everything under control, it cannot be true for Zimbabwe. Reports by bloggers at WildlifeDirect.org and on independent media show that Zimbabwe is experiencing an unprecedented decimation of wildlife. Reports indicate that Zimbabwe may have lost up to 80% of its wildlife. There is reason to believe that a large percentage of this wildlife consists of elephants.

As the hammer falls for the last time in South Africa on Thursday, we cannot in any way say that this is a victory for conservation. It is indeed a great disservice to conservation.

I categorically denounce this auction and call on CITES to rethink how they run endangered species affairs. It should not be lost to CITES that they exist to protect the endangered species against trade malpractices, not to serve partisan interests that work against the species.