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last year more elephants were killed than in 2011, which was when my piece, “Agony and Ivory,” came out in Vanity Fair, and 2011 was the worst year in twenty years, when the last, Japan-consumer-driven pogrom on pachyderms took place. The piece was followed by hard-hitting reportage by the National Geographic and the New York Times’ Nairobi correspodant, and helped launch a huge global campaign to stop the slaughter, but the poachers, most of them being illiterate and none of them getting these publications, have failed to get the word. The money is too good, so the elephants are being killed mercilessly and without compunction all over the continent. One set of tusks can net a poacher as much he would make in a year honestly. And the Chinese don’t want to hear that they shouldn’t buy ivory statues and bangles. But the Chinese and Thai governments in the face of international censure and growing domestic outrage have promised to take steps to curb the rampant illegal trade in their countries. But the pressure must be kept on if these magnificent animals are to survive. Every day brings news of new slaughter in Gabon, Chad, Cameroon, Kenya and the elephants other African range states, the poisoning of endangered pygmy elephants in Borneo, another fatal elephant-human conflict in India. The just-concluded CITES conference was one of the most productive ever. Here’s a story about it Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA testing of seized ivory
Daniel Cressey, Nature
14 March 2013
Protection for elephants, rhinos, sharks and trees extended in Bangkok.
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If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight, don’t be surprised if you find it full of celebrating conservationists.
An international meeting that takes place every three years to regulate trade in endangered animals and plants has bolstered protection for multiple species. Besides clamping down on trade in ivory and rhino horn, states party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) made the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber in final voting today.
Tom Milliken, who works for the wildlife-trade monitoring group TRAFFIC, which is headquartered in Cambridge, UK and has been heavily involved in the debates about elephant poaching, said, “I think this is one of the best COPs I’ve been to, and I’ve been to 14 of them.”
Before the conference, researchers across the world had warned of the dire state of African elephant populations, which are currently being decimated by rampant poaching. Many urged CITES to mandate forensic examination of large seizures of illegal ivory. Tusks’ DNA can be used to trace their origins, so that law enforcement can be directed to ‘hot spots’ of poaching. The ‘conference of the parties’ (COP) to the convention in Bangkok declared that such testing should be mandatory for large-scale seizures.
“I was ecstatic because it was the first time that the entire COP acknowledged the value and need for DNA testing for the origin of poached ivory. All my hard work had finally paid off,” Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory, said in an email to Nature.
The delegates also approved measures to curb demand for ivory, which could include public awareness campaigns in countries driving the trade, such as China. Shortly before the meeting, Tanzania removed one impediment to the discussion by withdrawing its proposal to sell stockpiled ivory, a move welcomed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK and the founder of the Save the Elephants charity.
“For the first time in 22 years there was no proposal to sell ivory. That meant we could start interacting constructively,” he says. Douglas-Hamilton adds that the demand-reduction move means that “we can now say with our hand on our heart that CITES supports campaigns to reduce the trade in ivory”.
Enforcement of rhino protection is to be strengthened, with Mozambique and Vietnam now required to toughen up their controls on trade in horns. Members of CITES also accepted that several species of shark — including the oceanic whitetip (Carcharhinus longimanus), scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrma lewini), great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran), smooth hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zigaena) and porbeagle (Lamna nasus) — should be added to ‘appendix II’ of the convention, which restricts trade in species not at immediate risk of extinction but in need of protection. Previously CITES delegates have hesitated to interfere with trade in commercially valuable marine species, say many campaigners.
Conservationists see the move into timber as equally significant, with a number of types of tropical hardwoods, including ebonies and rosewoods, added to appendix II. “At the last CITES conference in Qatar I felt we didn’t get anything we wanted. This conference was entirely different,” says Leigh Henry, a senior policy advisor at the conservation NGO WWF in Washington, DC. “The parties to CITES are really stepping up. We got almost everything we wanted. The parties followed the science and did what was best for conservation.”