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'One -off ' sales and poaching

Copyright EIA

Earlier this year, I was asked to write an opinion piece on the ivory trade for the Independent Newspaper . It was published on 15th April and in it I discussed how polarised and complex the ivory trade issue is.

Despite having flooded the Chinese and Japanese markets with ‘ivory from the ‘one-off legal sale’ of stockpiled ivory from four southern African countries in November 2008, at the time, we were seeing a huge increase in large seizures of illegal ivory, as well as escalating poaching of elephants on the ground in countries across Africa. That trend continues and in the lead up to the March 2010 meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species) we are seeing a lot of press coverage of the issue which is about to take centre stage yet again. Tanzania and Zambia have submitted proposals to down list their elephant populations from Appendix I to Appendix II with a request to sell their stockpiles - following in the footsteps of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Recent reports state that whilst Traffic (the agency tasked with monitoring the trade) have seen a 100% increase in the volume of ivory seized from 2008 to August 2009, they still firmly believe that there is no evidence to suggest that last year’s one off sale has prompted this resurgent illegal ivory trade. That may be true. However, the opposite is equally true: there is no evidence to suggest that it hasn’t. In the face of such overwhelming evidence of increased poaching and illegal trade, surely the precautionary principle needs to be applied when considering any further requests for ‘one off sales’ – which of course they no longer are?

I was also surprised to read that Tanzania has been praised for its effective enforcement of anti-poaching. That is not the story coming from the sharp end and certainly not the story emerging from its national press. Clearly there is a disconnect somewhere. In the meantime, we are looking at 25 tonnes of seized ivory and counting… Obviously we have no way of counting the successfully smuggled consignments. As we have been saying for many years, sophisticated criminal syndicates and networks are involved and enforcement agencies need to tackle these crimes as such. Once illegal ivory has found its way into a legal market, there is no way of determining where it came from or how it was procured.

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