Elephant Killing Fields Fuel Ivory Ban Debate. (13 December, 1997)

The mass slaughter of more than 200 elephants by poachers in the Congo is expected to fuel the debate over lifting the ban on ivory trade. David Barritt, African Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said he discovered the rotting corpses of 280 elephants near Congo's border with Gabon. It was the largest single mass killing of African elephants, he said.

The herd, including calves and pregnant females, was shot in a forest clearing by local inhabitants wielding AK-47 rifles. They had apparently been hired by poachers from Brazzaville, the capital of Congo, and were paid as little as $10 (about R46) for their work, and, in one case just a bottle of rum. Barritt, who on a recent visit to Brazzaville encountered Taiwanese and Chinese businessmen, said he believed the ivory was bing shipped to the Far East. 'The poachers told the local inhabitants, whom they hired, that it was all right to kill the elephants because next year the trade in ivory is going to be resumed legally,' Barritt said. 'This underlines our argument that if you have even limited trade in ivory it will be a catastrophe, because where you have a legal trade inevitably an illegal trade will follow.'

Debate about lifting the ivory ban intensified recently after Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia came out in favour of a resumption of trade. The Zimbabwe government said it would try to overturn the ban at a Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species conference in Harare next year. The government was embarrassed, however, by recent reports that ivory exports from the country to the Far East had been allowed to proceed unchecked.

Barritt's organisation and other conservation agencies are opposed to a lifting of the ban. He said that if the ivory trade were legalised it would be impossible to distinguish between legally obtained ivory and elephant tusks smuggled into the market by poachers. However, pro-trade conservationists say poachers will kill regardless of a ban. They say it is important to put a value on elephants so that the local population will regard them as assets and continue to conserve the species.

Julian Sturgeon, the Director of the Africa Resources Trust in Johannesburg, a conservation lobby group, said it was disingenuous to suggest that the mass killings in the Congo could be linked directly to the ivory trade debate. 'What is happening in the Congo is a tragedy but there are many social and political factors involved,' Sturgeon said. 'It would be an insult to the intelligence to suggest this is just to do with the ivory trade. The way to save elephants is to accord them a value.'