HONG KONG — The past couple of years has seen a stream of news about elephant killings and increasingly massive ivory seizures, a stream so relentless that it has become numbing.
A study released on Wednesday, however, still has the power to shock. Over the past eight years or so, according to the study, 11,000 elephants have been killed by poachers in the western African state of Gabon, where the Minkébé National Park once held the continent’s largest forest elephant population. Two-thirds of the park’s elephant population has been wiped out since 2004.
“The situation is out of control. We are witnessing the systematic slaughter of the world’s largest land mammal,” said Bas Huijbregts, head of the Central African strand of WWF’s global campaign against illegal wildlife trade, Wildlife Conservation Society, which conducted the study with the WWF and the Gabonese National Parks Agency, said the data represented trends across all remaining forest elephant strongholds in the region, and pointed to a “regional crisis.”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, in central Africa, is believed to have between 7,000 and 10,000 elephants — less than 10 percent of its population 20 years ago.
In the Central African Republic, which had as many as 80,000 elephants in the mid-1980s, the numbers are now down to just a few thousand as poachers are taking advantage of the political instability in the country to hunt the creatures.
And last year, hundreds of elephants were killed for their tusks in Cameroon, another western African nation.
Moreover, the Gabon slaughter has taken place in a country that had been thought to be less badly hit by poaching than other parts of Africa.
As my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman reported last year, Gabon’s government, blessed with billions of dollars of oil money, has made many of the right moves to protect its animals, setting aside chunks of land for national parks, and even lighting a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the trade was reprehensible.
As I wrote last year, demand for ivory from China is the leading driver behind the illegal trade, compounded by improved transport, trade links and a rise in the presence of Chinese nationals in Africa. And although the Chinese authorities are helping with awareness campaigns, what is really needed is on-the-ground enforcement, to help trace and combat the activities of Chinese middlemen in the illicit trade, experts have said.
For the crisis to be comprehensively addressed, Mr. Huijbregts of the WWF commented Wednesday, “the international intelligence community needs to get involved in this fight as soon as possible, in order to identify, track and put out of business these global criminal networks, which corrupt governments, erode national security and hamper economic development prospects.”
Unless the governments of the region and demand countries treat this issue as an international emergency, he said, “we cannot rule out that, in our lifetime, there will no longer be any viable elephant populations in Central Africa.”
IHT Rendezvous: Stark Numbers Reveal the Scale of Elephant Killings
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IHT Rendezvous: Stark Numbers Reveal the Scale of Elephant Killings
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IHT Rendezvous: Stark Numbers Reveal the Scale of Elephant Killings
