Ivory demand could see African elephant wiped out

A soaring demand for ivory in China and the Far East is putting Africa's elephant population under strain and could see the creatures wiped out altogether by poachers in some countries, conservationists have warned.

Trade in ivory was made illegal worldwide in 1989 but the ban was lifted in 2008 to allow Southern African countries to sell stockpiled ivory to China and Japan. Campaigners say this has also fuelled the demand for illegal ivory.

Organized criminal gangs are blamed for the lion's share of the trade, often paying impoverished and desperate locals to carry out the killings and harvest the previous tusks.

The backing from gangs means poachers come heavily armed and the military or wildlife units employed to stop them are frequently outgunned.

People from China's large and growing population living in Africa are now thought to be largely responsible for collecting the bounty and arranging for it to be shipped to Asia.

There, it is carved into household ornaments, jewellery and chopsticks by artisans who favour African over Asian ivory. The main buyers are believed to be newly-wealthy Chinese nationals in prosperous cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing.

Despite the global ban on the ivory trade, 2011 was the worst year for more than two decades for large seizures of illegal ivory. Wildlife groups say poaching rates in Africa are now increasing year on year.

In Cameroon earlier this year, poachers killed as many as 300 elephants over ten weeks while in neighbouring Gabon the previous year, the country's wildlife unit estimated that around 50 a week were being killed and the population could be wiped out by the end of the decade. In Samburu, Northern Kenya, a quarter of its previously stable elephant population has been lost since 2009, in large part due to illegal killing.

Iain Douglas Hamilton, the founder of the country's Save the Elephants charity, told a BBC Panorama investigation into the problem that they were in the middle of a poaching 'spike'.

“It is worse than it's ever been before,” he said. “If it got out of hand it would threaten not only elephants but the communities around.” Cynthia Moss, from Kenya's Amboseli Trust for Elephants, said some other areas of Africa were even worse off. “At the present rate I don't see it letting up and I think some countries are going to lose all their elephants and that is just tragic,” she said.

Meanwhile, African elephants could be extinct within 15 years because of the illegal ivory trade, conservation experts have warned.

The population - currently 600,000 - is diminishing by 38,000 each year.

These figures, calculated using the annual number of illegal tusk seizures, significantly exceed elephant birth rates meaning the species could face extinction entirely within 15 years, says Samuel Wasser of the Scientific American Journal.

The worldwide illegal trade in wildlife is valued at tens of billions of American dollars (£12.5billion) and is believed to have the same significance now as the blood-diamond trade during the peak of the African civil wars.

In 2006, 11 metric tonnes of illegal ivory were seized from ships bound for Taiwan and Japan.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) says immediate action needs to be taken. The group calls for EU and CITES members (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) to stop supporting legal ivory sales. Instead, they urge members to back Kenya’s proposal to extend the current 'resting period' on elephant and ivory sales from nine to 20 years at the next CITES meeting in March 2010.

“This alarming level of illegal hunting could drive the African elephant to extinction across much of Africa in just 15 years,” said Robbie Marsland, director of IFAW UK.

He added: “Most people will be shocked to hear that, 20 years on from a ban on international ivory trade, elephants in Africa are still threatened by commercial poaching. The ivory trade must be banned once again, and comprehensively, if we want to prevent the extinction of elephants.

“Sadly, the truth is that ivory trade anywhere is a threat to elephants everywhere.”

Chad’s Zakouma National Park had 3,885 elephants in 2005 but by 2009 the figure had plummeted to just 617. At least 11 rangers were killed by poachers there over the same period. Meanwhile, older elephants really are wiser, according to zoologists who found they are better able to tell which lion roars are particularly dangerous.

Although it is commonly assumed that lionesses do most of the hunting, when it comes to larger prey the stronger males tend to be more active and effective. - The Daily Telegraph