Elephants and Ivory

Forest and Bird, Volume 20, Issue 3, 1 August 1989, Page 6

Elephants and Ivory

Conservation groups have called for an immediate ban on all ivory trading in an attempt to save the African elephant. Some experts are predicting that the last wild African elephant could be extinct within the next decade unless urgent action is taken. The form of that action has recently been the subject of heated debate by conservation groups. Until June two opposite viewpoints on how to save African elephants had been battling it out. On the one side a consortium led by the International Wildlife Coalition (IWC) argued that the trade in ivory should be banned outright. On the other the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) contended that money from the sale of legal ivory could be used to save elephants. The original WWF/IUCN strategy involved high risks and huge numbers of elephants would have been sacrificed as a result of it. It proposed that 42 select populations comprising 350,000 elephants would be protected — but the remaining African population estimated at 350,000 would be "written off’ Critics pointed out that the 42 select populations were centred around the study sites of WWF/IUCN elephant advisers and that they are all happen to be in English speaking eastern and southern Africa. Africans in francophone states had been left at the hands of ivory poachers under the plan. The WWF/IUCN strategists say that in countries like Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa, legal ivory exports help conservation work. The I consortium took a different tack. It has petitioned the US Congress to raise the status of the elephant from Threatened to Endangered — a move which would put a stop to US imports of legal ivory overnight. In 1986 the US consumption of ivory amounted to 32,000 elephants, although it has fallen since then. The consortium is persuading the EC to ban ivory imports and is attempting to place the elephant under Appendix 1 of the CITES Convention, a much higher degree of protection which will mean no commercial trade between the 96 nations who have signed the Convention.

Still to contend with if that succeeds are the eastern ivory consuming nations such as Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. By June WWF/IUCN had come around to the I consortium’s point of view. IUCN chief Martin Holdgate announced that all trade in ivory should stop because "poaching has continued on a massive scale, and the market has clearly provided an outlet for illegal ivory alongside that legally taken. Stopping the trade altogether is the only way we have of closing the loophole." rofl