TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.009

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.6 KB | 133 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 76

Last Stand For Africa's Elephants


Record ivory prices send poachers after the survivors

By Eugene Linden


    Striding majestically across the savanna, the African
elephant is an unmistakable symbol of power and strength. As
recently as the 1970s, its numbers were so great that some
conservationists worried about overpopulation. Now the elephant
is involved in a desperate struggle to survive, and the reason
for its peril is one of its glories: the huge creature's
magnificent tusks of ivory. Since the early 1980s, the price of
ivory has surged from $25 per lb. to $80 per lb. As a result,
growing bands of wily and ruthless poachers have taken to
hunting down elephants illegally all across Africa, killing the
animals with everything from automatic weapons to poison. About
10% of the remaining African elephants were killed last year,
reducing their ranks to fewer than 750,000. If the slaughter
continues at the present pace, the wild elephant could be close
to extinction within a decade.

    This week, to prevent such a tragedy, conservationists will
unveil the most elaborate and costly plan in history to rescue a
single species. Sponsored by the African Elephant Conservation
Coordinating Group, a coalition of several international
organizations, the plan calls for bolstering efforts to protect
elephants against poachers, a study of ways to crack down on
illegal trading of tusks, and a publicity campaign to alert
people and governments to the relationship between the trade in
ivory and the plight of the elephant. The AECCG hopes to raise
at least $15 million in four years to finance its work.

    The effort may be futile, though, unless demand for the
animals' tusks is reduced sharply. Ivory is fashioned into
everything from billiard balls and knife handles to necklaces
and figurines. Craftsmen have even carved tusks into ornamental
replicas of AK-47 assault rifles.

    Theoretically, the business of taking ivory from animals
alive or dead is highly regulated and ostensibly restricted by
African governments. And under an international convention,
there is a quota system that puts limits on the number of tusks
each country can export.

    So much for theory. In reality, the quota system has been
ineffective in controlling the trade. Up to 90% of the tusks
that enter the marketplace have been taken illegally by
poachers, and smugglers have little trouble getting the ivory
out of Africa. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi has
reportedly financed his insurrection with ivory taken from more
than 100,000 elephants. Some countries seem to be conduits for
the illegal trade. With roughly 4,500 elephants of its own,
Somalia has still managed to export tusks from an estimated
13,800 elephants in the past three years, evidence that the
country has been providing false documents for ivory poached
elsewhere. In response, the U.S. is expected this week to
announce a ban on imports of Somalian ivory.

    The leading destination for legal and perhaps illegal ivory
is Asia. Hong Kong is a major manufacturer and exporter of ivory
jewelry, and 30% of the colony's output goes to Americans.
"People in the U.S. just don't connect ivory with elephants,"
says Mark Stanley Price, a director of the African Wildlife
Foundation, "but every bracelet represents a dead elephant."
Another top consumer is Japan, where ivory has long been used
for personalized seals called hanko. But under pressure from
conservationists, Hong Kong and Japan have begun to check
closely the documents on ivory imports to weed out illegal
shipments. Japan's legal ivory imports, in particular, have
dropped sharply in the past three years.

    Unfortunately, the decline in ivory trade in Japan and
elsewhere may not reflect a drop in demand so much as the
decimation of adult elephants. As mature elephants are killed,
it becomes harder to satisfy the world's appetite for ivory.
Stephen Cobb, who leads an ivory study for the AECCG, says the
reduction in trade "is a clear sign of the collapse of
exploitable elephant populations."

    Some conservationists would like to see a total ban on the
ivory trade. But that would be no easier to enforce than the
laws against selling cocaine and heroin. Dealers bold enough to
defy the embargo could anticipate higher profits than ever.
Moreover, poor African countries need the revenue from at least a
limited amount of legal trading.

    Realizing that if elephants vanish, so might tourists, some
African nations are determined to slow down the killing. In
addition, the animal is a vital part of Africa's unique
ecosystem. For eons, elephants have knocked down trees, helping
to give Africa its distinctive mix of forest and savanna and
opening up the land for other big mammals.

    Unwilling to let the elephant be wiped out, some governments
have declared war on illegal killing. In Kenya armed patrols
have orders to shoot poachers. Sometimes, though, the culprits
are a formidable force themselves. At Kenya's Tsavo National
Park, scores of poachers dressed in battle fatigues and armed
with automatic weapons killed one policeman and wounded several
others.

    Besieged by armies of hunters, many herds are literally on
the run. Conservationists use the phrase "refugee elephants" to
describe animals fleeing Mozambique to crowd into protected
areas in Zimbabwe. The killing of older animals with the
biggest tusks threatens to reduce herds to what Tanzanian game
manager Constantius Mlay describes as collections of naive
teenagers without the wise old elephants needed as leaders in
times of drought and food scarcity.

    Conservationists cannot hope to protect elephants throughout
their African homelands. For that reason, the AECCG, which
includes such major conservation groups as the World Wildlife
Fund, TRAFFIC and Wildlife Conservation International, envisions
a triage approach. The group plans to concentrate its resources
on about 40 populations that have the best chance of being
guarded from poachers. That strategy would focus on saving about
250,000 elephants and would reluctantly leave another 500,000
to their fate.

    This prospect is not so dismal as it sounds. If protected
well, the remaining quarter-million elephants would be a large
enough population to thrive and multiply again. In fact, David
Western, director of WCI, asserts that if allowed to grow old
and die naturally, the elephants in these herds could probably
supply enough tusks to support an ivory market larger than
today's illegal business.