By Costas Christ
In the 1980s, I did a stint as a wildlife researcher in Kenya. I witnessed a decade of unprecedented slaughter of African elephants by poachers, out to profit from rising ivory demand in Asia’s fast-growing economies of the day.
By 1989, more than 600,000 elephants had been killed — half of Africa’s entire population (Kenya alone lost 85 percent of its herd), leading to a global ban shortly there- after on the trade and sale of ivory by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Following the ivory ban, things started to improve: The number of elephants killed illegally declined, and their populations also began to rebound in Kenya and Tanzania.
But like a cancer that slows only to return and metastasize, the killing fields are back.
Dozens of elephants are currently being gunned down daily by high-tech poachers wielding AK-47s, part of highly organized international criminal networks. An estimated 25,000 African elephants were killed in 2011 alone (out of a population of about 500,000). And since 2007, the illegal ivory trade has more than doubled.
If the massacres do not stop, our children could be the last generation to see an African elephant in the wild. As travelers, we can — and must — do something about it. Here are the crucial actions to take.
1. Support an unequivocal and permanent ivory ban.
A few African governments with pockets of healthy herds have large stockpiles of ivory from culling operations and smuggler confiscations. Countries such as South Africa and Botswana want controlled legal sales of their ivory stocks, with the income providing funding for conservation. The argument has been that it would help drive down global prices and undercut the illegal black market trade. The problem: It hasn’t worked. More....