Saving the African Elephant
Saving the Tiger
African elephants are dying at the hands of poachers in numbers not seen since the ivory wars of the 1980's. The primary cause is escalating demand for ivory in China, Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia stimulated by increasing affluence and facilitated by an expanding commercial presence in elephant range countries.
The CITES MIKE program which monitors population trends and illegal killing of elephants provides stark evidence of the slaughter. Between 2003 and 2009, the number of elephant carcasses in Tanzania's Selous Game Reserve attributed to poaching increased threefold. In Mozambique's Niassa National Reserve, poached carcasses increased nearly threefold between 2006 and 2008. The estimated elephant population in Chad's Zakouma National Park declined from 3,000 in 2006 to 600 in 2009. Poached carcasses made up 85% of the total counted during that period.
At the same time, data gathered by TRAFFIC for the CITES Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS) indicates that the illegal ivory trade is expanding and that the frequency of large-scale illegal shipments of ivory has increased significantly since 2005.
This past August, Tanzanian authorities seized 1,041 elephant tusks from a boat bound for Malaysia, bringing the total seized during 2011 to over 4,700. The increasing scale and volume of the illegal ivory trade strongly suggest the involvement of highly organized international crime syndicates.
The illegal ivory trade now impacts all remaining major forest and savannah elephant populations. Given the high value and relatively low risk of the illegal trade, inadequate law enforcement capacity, supportive cultural attitudes, widespread corruption, and pervasive poverty and increasing elephant-human conflict in rural communities sharing elephant habitat, the trade is not likely to abate without concerted effort and investment on the part of key range countries,
China, Thailand and other Southeast Asian consumer countries, the international community, donor agencies and conservation organizations.
In late August of this year, the Standing Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) officially launched a trust fund to support implementation of the African Elephant Action Plan with the specific goal of raising $100 million over the next three years to, in the words of CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, "enhance law enforcement capacity and secure the long-term survival of African elephant populations." Whether the funds can be raised and expended effectively remains to be seen, but without such concerted effort on the part of donors and the range states, the slaughter of African elephants will continue to escalate.
For its part, the foundation is investing $2 million a year to help protect African elephant populations at important sites in the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania.