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By Bryan Christy
PUBLISHED
Today is World Elephant Day, but it isn't
necessarily good news for Africa’s elephants: Pressure is mounting in southern
Africa to lift the ban on the sale of ivory.
In the mid-1980s, during the last great elephant
poaching crisis, Africa lost nearly half its elephant population, roughly
600,000 animals, in a decade. But the world responded in 1989 with a global ban
on the international ivory trade, and for a while elephants in many parts of
Africa recovered.
Today the poaching crisis has returned, owing
largely to demand for ivory in Asia, where it’s carved
into statues, bangles, and chopsticks. Roughly 30,000 elephants are killed
every year by poachers, an unsustainable number that doesn’t take into account
the incredible violence and eventerrorist funding behind the illegal ivory trade.
Twenty-seven years after Kenyan President Daniel
Arap Moi set fire to 13 tons of ivory, igniting the world in favor of a global
ivory trade ban and launching an elephant recovery, Zimbabwe and Namibia have
filed petitions to lift the international ivory trade ban and allow the sale of
ivory again.
The proposals come up for a vote during a meeting
from September 23 to October 5 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where parties to
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES) will gather, as they do every three years, to decide which
wildlife species get protected, and how.
Countries in southern Africa—notably Namibia, South
Africa, and Zimbabwe—have not only opposed ivory destruction as a conservation tool, but they also
they wish to do the opposite of burning ivory. They want to sell it.
“The
ivory ban is a total failure,” says Rowan Martin, Zimbabwe’s representative to
CITES. Proposals by Zimbabwe and Namibia would
remove their elephant populations from the global ban on commercial trade in
elephants or their parts.
It’s a fight that has been waged for more than a
quarter of a century, employing many of the same tools (last spring Kenya set fire to an estimated hundred million
dollar’s worth of ivory) and even some of the same people—most notably Martin
himself. In 1989 Martin was Zimbabwe’s CITES representative and led a block of
southern African countries in opposition to proposals for a global ivory trade
ban. Zimbabwe and its partners lost, and the ivory ban went into effect in 1990.
Although Zimbabwe threatened to ignore the
international ban, it held, and elephant populations in hard-hit East Africa
began to recover.
This year, Martin is back. He’s the brains behind
pro-trade proposals by both Zimbabwe and Namibia that argue, as Zimbabwe did in
1989, that their elephant populations are healthy enough to sustain an ivory
trade. (Namibia's CITES negotiator drew on Zimbabwe's proposal, Martin says,
and the language of the two proposals is strikingly similar.)
Like Martin, the proposals pull no punches.
Namibia’s proposal describes the CITES ivory trade restrictions as ultra
vires, meaning beyond the
law, and makes a diplomatic threat: Unless CITES parties agree to a framework
for selling ivory, Namibia will consider CITES restrictions on its ability to
trade ivory and elephant parts, including an existing nine-year freeze on ivory
trade proposals, "as pro non scripto"—as if they had not
been written.
In 2008, CITES parties agreed to a one-time sale of
ivory from southern Africa to China and Japan on condition that no country
propose selling ivory again for at least nine years. In its proposal this year,
Zimbabwe argues that no country can negotiate away its right to negotiate, and
Namibia says CITES has failed to uphold an important element of that 2008
compromise agreement. CITES parties promised to establish a framework for
selling ivory in the future, Namibia asserts, a so-called ivory trade
decision-making mechanism (DMM) in CITES parlance.
The Diamond Model
In a third proposal up for consideration during the
CITES meeting, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa insist on creating a DMM
“for a process of future trade in elephant ivory.”
Martin has had a hand in that too. In 2011 he was
part of a consultancy chosen to advise CITES on how to create a DMM framework
for selling ivory. In a report issued in May 2012, his group proposed a
centralized ivory selling organization modeled after the one-time De Beers diamond
monopoly.
De Beers once controlled the entire global market in
raw diamonds, selling them via a single London location to select buyers around
the world. In Martin's DMM ivory proposal, governments rather than a single
corporate interest would operate as stakeholders, and the central selling
entity would report to CITES parties.
But an ivory selling organization has failed to
garner approval by the parties, particularly, critics say, because an ivory ban
is in place.
For Martin, elephant and rhino trade policies should
be set by countries where the animals live. He is an advisor to South African
rhino rancher John Hume, who is suing South Africa to lift a national
moratorium on rhino horn trading as a first step toward lifting an
international ban on rhino horn trade too.
“Wildlife is being treated as a global commons,”
Martin says. “Activists in the West say wildlife belongs to everybody. The hell
it does! It belongs to the people on whose land it occurs. The people who pay
for it!”
It is said that elephants never forget, and if that
is true, then this year’s battle in South Africa will be familiar—only the
combatants will be older, and elephant populations across Africa, far weaker.
CREDIT: FEEDSPOT
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