INTERVIEW - Kenya says elephant poaching sharply up
Date: 28-Jan-00
Country: KENYA
Nehemiah Rotich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), called on
world governments to reimpose a total ban on the ivory trade.
At least 67 Kenyan elephants were killed for their tusks in 1999, up
from an average of less than 15 in recent years, Rotich said.
He had no doubt the increase was directly linked to the sales of ivory
to Japan from three southern African nations last April.
"As a result of these one-off sales, we have seen a huge increase in
poaching," Rotich told Reuters in an interview. "A small legal trade
will go a long way to stimulate a lot of illegal ivory trade."
In 1997, member nations of the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES) relaxed their ban on the trade to allow
one-off sales by Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana. Those sales were made
last April, with Japanese traders buying almost 60 tonnes.
The three countries want to continue selling and South Africa is seeking
permission to sell 28 tonnes of tusks from its Kruger National Park.
The southern African nations say the auctions raise money for wildlife
conservation and that there is no evidence they lead to an increase in
poaching.
POACHING SOARS ACROSS AFRICA
Environmentalist groups disagree, saying poaching has soared across
Africa in the last year.
The dispute will dominate the next meeting of CITES in April in Nairobi,
where Kenya and India - both rely heavily on the tourist revenues that
large elephant herds can bring - will lead the drive for a return to the
total ban.
Rotich said it was not just the number of dead elephants inside its
parks that pointed to a resurgence of the trade: seizures of illegal
ivory have jumped and KWS has gathered evidence of a substantial rise in
ivory requests from abroad.
Some of that demand is being met by poachers digging up ivory captured
years ago and buried in the ground.
But Rotich said many tusks seized by authorities in recent months still
had elephant flesh attached to them, showing they were fresh kills.
He said the situation could get dramatically worse unless world
governments reimposed the total ban at the next CITES meeting.
Poaching decimated Africa's elephant populations in the 1970s and 1980s,
but they began to recover after CITES imposed its ban in 1989.
In Kenya, the elephant population had plummeted from around 140,000 in
1972 to just 19,000 in 1989. It is back up to around 29,000.
"If the total ban wasn't imposed there is really no question that
Kenya's elephants would have been wiped out," Rotich said.
