Nearly a dozen countries in Central Africa signed a plan this month to toughen anti-poaching laws designed to fight against escalating illegal wildlife trade, especially decimating elephant populations in the thousands each year.
Cameroon Elephants. Stock Photo.
In March 2012, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that the Cameroon military entered a national park in the north region of the country where poachers had slaughtered hundreds of elephants since January.
The WWF added that “up to 12,000 elephants are killed each year for their ivory, most in Central Africa.”
This new plan to combat the problem has been adopted by 10 member countries of the Central African Forest Commission, which are: Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Gabon. Rwanda, and Sao Tome e Principe. The commission is also known as COMIFAC.
This plan includes provisions to increase anti-poaching efforts in each of the participating countries and enable joint-country patrols in transboarder areas.
The wildlife ministers from the COMIFAC countries have also pledged to cooperate with law enforcement agencies, including police, customs, and judiciary systems in order to address the problem.
There is also a conference planned for sometime next year for the heads of state to address the wildlife losses and strategize on efforts to maintain biodiversity in the continent, said the WWF, which together with TRAFFIC and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has provided technical and financial support toward the development of the plan.
The WWF will also said that it will continue provide ongoing support for the implementation of the plan. Elephant poaching on the continent has been an escalating problem.
The poachers suspected of killing the elephants in North Cameroon’s Boube N’Djida National Park are “believed to be foreigners who entered the country illegally across its boarder from Chad,” said the WWF.
In a letter to Cameroon President Paul Biya, European Parliament member Catherine Bearder, a Lib Dem MEP for South East England, said she was concerned about further killings in the Boube N’Djida National Park and the surrounding countries, saying that from reports the poachers appeared “clearly well organized” and had a “professional operation” on what appeared to be an “industrial scale.”
Bearder advised her letter that in order “to avoid similar slaughter of elephants or other species in the future, we consider it important to secure all parks in Cameroon with sufficient numbers of well equipped, armed, motivated, and well trained rangers.”
Offering aide, Bearder continued saying, “We realized that this scale of operation may be a stretch on the resources of one country and we in the European Parliament are at your disposal to help you in any way we can to tackle these urgently needed measures.”
Last month in testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Tom Cardamone, managing director of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington. D.C. research firm focused on global financial systems, said that estimates are that “the market price of poached ivory is at $400 per pound” and that the global value of the illegal wildlife trade in all forms, except fishing, is between $7.8 billion to $10 billion a year.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of the African Elephant Specialist Group, a division of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), added in his testimony to the committee that at the ground level, last year, the “ivory of the largest male elephant poached in the Samburu population was equivalent to 1.5 years’ salary for a wildlife ranger, or 15 years’ salary for an unskilled worker. Since then the ivory prices have soared yet higher to 18,000 Kenya shillings per kilo.”
The major market for ivory is in Asia right now. Hamilton said that, “Currently, demand for ivory exceeds supply. China has emerged as the leading driver of illegal trade in ivory. According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, 90 percent of the ivory seized at Kenya’s airports involves Chinese, and since 2007, the amount of illegal ivory seized in Kenya has gone up by 800 percent.”
Hamilton added that, “There is more disposable income in China today than in history. Ivory has the cachet of being a luxury status commodity, and more people than ever before are able to own a piece of ivory now. Ideally, the U.S. government could share some awareness of the elephant situation and work toward a joint leadership with China to solve the problem.”
Hamilton continued that, “If China would declare a unilateral ten-year moratorium on ivory imports, there would be a future for elephants in Africa,” and that Thailand should “enact serious legislative reforms to control its internal ivory market.”
Beyond the destruction to the elephants themselves, the poaching also hurts African countries economically. Hamilton explained that, “Poaching, by definition, entails armed individuals, often gangs, operating illegally in wildlife habitats that, in many cases, are protected areas that attract tourists and contribute to the economic development of many African countries.”
Aside from the newest efforts to crack down on poaching, the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime is working with donor groups, governments, agencies, and institutions to raise financial resources, as well as provide other logistical support to combat the problem.
Other groups working against the problem include the African Elephant Conservation Fund and the Africa Elephant Fund.
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