This posting may have better
news on the ivory crisis. Hope so.
Let’s start with this from
the online group One Green Planet. It opens with
Many never thought they’d see the day come, but
it finally has – China, one of the world’s largest importers of ivory, has
announced, that it, along with 29 other nations, will help protect the world’s
elephants by criminalizing poaching.Now, that’s something to celebrate.
A Space For Giants newsletter
of December rejoices in the growing tide of goodwill and scale of responses to
the elephant/ivory story.
Three days ago I posted on a
small part of the ugly mess of the current ivory crisis (not the first) as this 1983 book title indicates.
For good reviews of this
very long-standing issue get hold of either this book by Ian Parker and the late Mohamend Amin or Ian Parker’s more
recent What I Tell You Three Times is
True. The latter is a really in-depth examination of the subject.
There has been a considerable
amount of social media traffic on many aspects of it. I have picked up some
thirty postings in the last month alone. Like the two I opened with about half
of them take a slightly different and hopefully more optimistic view of the
situation, many of them reporting seizures of ivory, either as raw tusks or
worked items. Others deal with criminal trials.
In South Africa, where rhino
poaching is a major concern, they are preparing for the elephant war with
publicity. This video is well
worth the watching. Indeed if you have time for nothing else do spend the ten
minutes with it.
Namibia is also being
pro-active and investing in technology
that includes drones,
infra-red cameras, tagging with GPS, and the latest software.
There have been recent
reports from other African countries such as Gabon, Kenya, Republic of Congo (2
reports) and Mozambique.
Tanzania has a real battle on its hands, as indicated by the actions that have recently been taken. They include ivory seizures in Zanzibar and Dar esSalaam The dismissal of many allegedly corrupt wildlife department staff and several other columns in the on-line allAfrica news that include a call to deal with the so-called Poaching Barons as well as a call for tougher poaching laws.
Kenya also seems to be taking
things more seriously, not only with the new laws I mentioned in the blog of
Jan 7 but in catching offenders (again two reports.)
In that Jan 7 post I
mentioned that a new law, if signed by President
Uhuru Kenyatta, will make it possible to punish poachers with life
sentences. A remarkable public admission was made on Jan 3 by a former employee
of the Lewa Conservancy. Keleshi Parkusaa, 39, said he has
been a poacher even when he was employed there for three years. He obviously
admitted his crimes before the law comes into effect in order to avoid that
sentence.
Other countries that have
taken action are France where 3 tonnes of ivory are to be burned. This picture by Reuters/Keith
Bedford shows some of the items. Also Vietnam, where a court has sentenced a company
director and his deputy to 3 years in jail each for smuggling 158 pieces of
ivory tusks weighing more than 2.4 tons.
And the USA where a New York City antiques dealer who pleaded
guilty to conspiracy for smuggling artifacts made from rhinoceros horns from
the U.S. to China and Hong Kong has been sentenced to three years in prison,
plus three years’ supervised release.
The key, as everyone realizes,
is China.
Basket ball star Yao Ming has
been actively campaigning about conservation issues for quite some time and his
efforts to publicize the shark’s fin soup issue has yielded encouraging results. He has been similarly active
on the ivory front and his and other peoples efforts may be changing the way
that folks in China think about these issues.
This anti-elephant poaching story filed from Kenya and Mozambique by Yuan Duanduan
titled The Blood Ivory:
Behind the Largest Ivory Smuggling Cases in China has gone viral.
In
it he wrote
China has become the
largest illegal ivory consumer market in the world, but 2 /3 of the Chinese
people do not know ivory is obtained through killing the elephant.The ivory trade has become a source of capital for African terrorist groups, forming a tight secretive network of poachers, small and big middlemen.
In recent news on November 5, 2013, Xiamen Customs announced the largest ivory smuggling cases uncovered in recent years, two cases of which ivory added up to 11.88 tons, worth 603 million yuan. If it hadn’t been seized, the ivory from Africa would have infiltrated China ‘s secretive “black market”, to be eventually sold into private collections.
As of Dec 20 the story had
over 10 million Tweets and Retweets on Weibo (China’s
Twitter/Facebook hybrid)
"The
article was reposted on 24 online discussion forums or Bulletin Board Systems
(BBS) including Mop and Tianya, two of the most popular in China. Thousands of
comments were generated on the Tianya BBS forum alone. Overall over 5,000
comments on the article were posted on Weibo, BBS fora, and other
websites."
A
very clever ploy was to merge the image of China’s iconic panda with the shape
of an elephant. This poster, courtesy of
WildAid reads: Protect the pandas of Africa - elephants. When the buying
stops the killing can too.
Then came the Jan 6 report of
the crushing of 6 tonnes of ivory in Guangzhou and on the same day a senior government
administrator's answers to questions from
reporters Liu Yang Yang, Wang Xi, Han Qiao about that destruction
I fear that only very
cautious optimism should be felt. One of the several concerned groups Elephant Advocacy had these thoughts about the
ivory crush.
The future?
One of the problems is that
nobody really knows the real number s of elephants in Africa. CITES reports probably give the most
reliable figures, but even they are inevitably fraught with estimates and
inaccuracies. The news that Paul Allen,
the Microsoft billionaire has
announced that he will fund a pan-African survey is a huge step in the right direction. The will aim to calculate how many actually remain, where they are found, what threats
they face and whether their total population numbers are in fact increasing or
decreasing.