Law enforcement: the elephant in the ivory room

Note from Rock Environmental's President, Britt Hosmer:

The CITES CoP15 in Qatar is taking place over the next few weeks. If you are interested in the debate over the elephant ivory trade - please read through this article. Both sides are laid out in a fair and balanced manor. Thank you to the author of this article, Tom Milliken who is the regional director of the wildlife-trade monitoring network TRAFFIC in eastern and southern Africa and manages the Elephant Trade Information System.

SENEGAL clings to the hope that elephants still live within its borders, even though not a single animal has been observed there in the past decade. The International Union for Conservation of Nature puts Senegal's wild elephant population at 1, but speculates that another nine animals might be out there.

Not likely. Those elephants - or at least their tusks - have probably already passed through the sprawling tourist curio market in the country's capital, Dakar. On a recent visit, the wildlife-trade monitoring network TRAFFIC recorded 169 kilograms of ivory openly for sale. There is certainly a lot more ivory in Senegal than there are elephants.

Dakar's is one of a multitude of unregulated ivory markets across Africa and in Asia. There are no rules, regulations or law enforcement; just ivory business as usual every day.

This week, representatives of 175 governments will be in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. There, the ivory trade will be discussed in what is sure to be a heated session.

African nations are at loggerheads over ivory, specifically whether stockpiles of tusks accumulated through natural elephant deaths and the control of problem animals should be allowed to be sold.

On one side are Tanzania and Zambia, who will ask CITES to sanction a one-off sale of 112 tonnes of stockpiled ivory. They argue that where ivory is harvested sustainably and the profits put back into elephant protection, numbers are soaring. In late 2008, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana legally sold 106 tonnes of ivory. All revenues went back into elephant conservation. These countries are home to around half of all Africa's elephants.

On the other side is an alliance led by Kenya but consisting mostly of central and west African nations. They see legalised ivory sales as showing a green light to poachers: if you permit sales under CITES, you stimulate demand which will be met through the illegal slaughter of elephants and the smuggling of their tusks. This alliance argues that the only logical step is to halt all ivory trade for 20 years.

Who is right? Do legal ivory sales really lead to more trade in poached ivory? For 21 years, TRAFFIC has been tracking the illegal trade by collecting records of ivory seizures from around the world. The resulting Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS) is the largest database of its kind, with more than 15,000 records.

So what does it tell us? Both sides of the argument will erroneously claim that it contains data to support their case. For example, since the 2008 sale, illicit trade has climbed alarmingly - apparently supporting the sale-leads-to-poaching hypothesis. But look further, and it is clear the illicit trade started rising at least as far back as 2004, though it turned sharply upwards in 2009.

The pro-sale camp will point to events following the only other legal ivory sale so far, which took place in 1999. On that occasion, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe sold a total of 50 tonnes of ivory, and the ETIS analysis shows a subsequent five-year decline in illegal ivory trade.

What are we to conclude from this? The figures suggest that one-off ivory sales are not, in fact, an important factor driving the illicit trade in ivory. Like ripples from a stone tossed into a moving river, their effect vanishes in the flow.

So what factors are important? Four successive ETIS analyses have found illicit trade to be strongly correlated with the presence of ivory markets unfettered by law enforcement, like Senegal's souk. Such markets are found all over Africa: in Ivory Coast, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and even Egypt. In Asia, Thailand has a massive unregulated market. Burma and Vietnam have ivory markets. The list goes on.

Ivory markets that are unfettered by law enforcement are found all over Africa and in Asia

ETIS also demonstrates the role of law enforcement in inhibiting illicit trade. For example, the 13 countries in the elephant's west African range have collectively reported only 30 ivory seizures inside their borders in the past 21 years; Senegal has reported none. At the same time, 28 tonnes of illegal ivory from these countries has turned up in more than 1350 seizures in other parts of the world. Similarly, the seven countries of central Africa have reported only 90 seizures at home since 1989, but over 900 seizures of their ivory have occurred further afield.

In sharp contrast, the 17 countries of eastern and southern Africa have collectively made over 3300 ivory seizures themselves, 1000 more than were made elsewhere involving ivory from those countries.

ETIS also points to the increasing role of Asian-run crime syndicates in moving large volumes of ivory from Africa to Asia. At home, China claims to have a tightly controlled regime for trading in ivory, and imposes the death penalty for large-scale infringements. Yet Chinese nationals living in Africa seem oblivious to this, despite a firm commitment made by China to CITES in 2008 that it would ensure its citizens living in Africa were fully aware of the illegality of dealing in ivory. The promised mission to spread this message has not taken place: it's time to honour that commitment now.

The CITES meeting offers a chance to stem the flow of illicit ivory from Africa to Asia. If governments there commit to act against organised criminal gangs and clamp down on unregulated markets, we can be optimistic there will be a real impact on the surge of illegal trade.

Until then, arguments over the impacts of one-off sales will continue to divert attention away from the real problem: finding ways to stop the flow of illicit ivory at source.