Tag Archives: CITES

News, Politics, Government

Tanzanians see official hand in elephant poaching

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Pratik Patel gazed glumly as the herder’s scrawny brown dogs moved between piles of bones to eat the rotting elephant flesh. He pointed to the nearby road and wondered aloud: How could poachers kill an elephant just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Tanzania‘s main safari highway?

Conservationists have long warned of the existential danger that poachers pose to Africa‘s elephants. And it’s in Tanzania, home of the Serengeti game reserve and one of the world’s two largest elephant populations, that the scale of the killings and the involvement of government employees may be the most chilling.

The three elephant corpses seen by an Associated Press reporter eight weeks ago lay in a game park just a few miles from a busy junction outside Arusha, a city of 500,000 people.

“Twenty-four elephants were shot within 10 square miles over the last three months. Thirty miles from here there are another 26 carcasses,” said Patel, a safari tour operator trying to raise the alarm about the country’s dying elephants. “And this is just a teaser. If we go to southern Tanzania I can show you 70 carcasses in one day,” he said, referring to the Selous, the world’s largest game reserve.

The man tasked with saving Tanzania‘s elephants is Khamis Suedi Kagasheki, minister for natural resources and tourism. Patel believes Kagasheki, a former intelligence officer, is trying hard to beat the poachers, but is up against a government cabal unwilling to give up illegal profits.

Much of the demand for ivory is in Asia, especially China, luring poachers across Africa to slay the giants and cut out their tusks for rewards far beyond the daily wage. According to CITES, the international body that monitors endangered species, the illegal ivory trade has more than doubled since 2007.

Every week brings new reports of elephant deaths and the government workers alleged to have killed them — soldiers, game wardens, police, customs officials, all complicit in the killings of the top tourism treasure for this poor East African nation of 50 million people.

Botswana, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Kenya are also suffering from elephant poaching. But Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of the London-based nonprofit Save The Elephants, says he is most worried about Tanzania‘s because of its huge population — somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000.

Poaching here “is far bigger than is happening anywhere else

From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/G-KIuua16Ro/

Articles of Interest

CITES Adds Sharks, Manta Rays Used In Chinese Cooking To List Of Endangered Species

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By The Huffington Post News Editors

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, took action to reduce global trade in endangered sharks and rays this week at its triennial Wildlife Conference in Bangkok, adding manta rays and five species of shark to its list of animals protected under the treaty.

Sharks and manta rays are some of the most majestic animals in the ocean, but some gourmands have long seen them as swimming carriers for fins and gills used in traditional Chinese dishes. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year to sate human appetites for pricy shark’s fin soup, which has led to a 97 percent drop in the population over two centuries. Manta rays are sometimes harvested for their gill rakers, used in certain traditional Chinese medicines.

The addition of the six species to CITES‘s Appendix II will make it illegal for fishermen to catch any individual specimen without a permit from a local authority. These permits are supposed to certify that the fish is caught in quantities that won’t lead to extinction, in a way that minimizes pain. This latter stipulation may be especially important in the shark fin trade, as shark fishermen are notorious for cutting fins off sharks and releasing them back into the ocean, where they usually die.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

Science & Technology

Conservationists to CITES: Stop trade in wild cheetahs

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The Wildlife Conservation Society, Zoological Society of London, and Endangered Wildlife Trust have joined representatives from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), currently meeting in Bangkok, to highlight the plight of wild cheetahs threatened by the illegal pet trade. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org

News, Politics, Government

Ivory trade nations face threat of sanctions

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Top conservation organizations warned Wednesday that the illegal ivory trade is hastening the decline of Africa‘s already endangered elephant population, and said they are ready to punish nations that are lax in fighting the problem.

“Globally, illegal ivory trade activity has more than doubled since 2007, and is now over three times larger than it was in 1998,” said a report issued in Bangkok at a meeting of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

CITES has put three African and five Asian nations on notice that they have failed to adequately crack down on the ivory trade, and that by next week they must come up with a detailed and credible plan of action for curbing the trade across and within their borders. They must also meet those targets or face trade sanctions next year.

The nations threatened with sanctions are Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and China. Sanctions would keep those nations from trading even in legal wildlife products by barring other CITES member nations from buying from them.

A CITES-led project that monitors about 40 percent of Africa‘s elephant population estimated that 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011, and the numbers are probably the same or greater for last year, said the report, produced by CITES, the U.N. Environment Program, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, better known as TRAFFIC.

The report said the increased poaching and loss of habitat threaten the survival of elephant populations in Central Africa and undermine previously more secure populations in West, Southern and East Africa.

Curbing the ivory trade is a major topic for the CITES meeting, attended by about 2,000 delegates representing 178 governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and groups speaking for indigenous peoples.

The report, “Elephants in the Dust — The African Elephant Crisis,” said criminal networks are increasingly active and entrenched in the trafficking of ivory between Africa and Asia. “Training of enforcement officers in the use of tracking, intelligence networks and innovative techniques, such as forensic analysis, is urgently needed,” it said.

Officials from the conservation groups said CITES is also putting pressure on governments of nations found to be key links in the chain of the illegal ivory trade.

Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC‘s ivory expert, said he …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News

Articles of Interest

CITES Report Shows Ivory Trade Is Hastening Decline Of Endangered Elephants In Africa

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By The Huffington Post News Editors

BANGKOK — Top conservation organizations warned Wednesday that the illegal ivory trade is hastening the decline of Africa‘s already endangered elephant population, and said they are ready to punish nations that are lax in fighting the problem.

“Globally, illegal ivory trade activity has more than doubled since 2007, and is now over three times larger than it was in 1998,” said a report issued in Bangkok at a meeting of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post

News, Politics, Government

UN calls for clampdown on illegal wildlife trade

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The head of the United Nations environment agency is calling on the international community to clamp down hard on the world’s illegal wildlife trade, calling it a lucrative criminal business that is threatening to wipe out some of the planet’s most iconic species.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, made the call Sunday during the opening meeting of the 178-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, in Bangkok.

Steiner says the recent, massive upsurge in poaching of endangered African elephants and rhinos should be “a wake-up call for all of us.”

Steiner says the illicit trade in protected wildlife species is a billion-dollar business that is comparable to that of illegal narcotics and arms.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News

News, Politics, Government

Ahead of CITES, pressure to ban Thai ivory trade

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You can buy it freely in urban markets and rural stalls set up at elephant shows in Thailand every day: ivory, carved into everything from intricate statuettes of the pachyderm-headed Hindu deity Ganesh that go for more than $1,000 a piece to tiny tusk pendants worth less than $10.

But the thriving trade here, conservationists say, is helping fuel the unprecedented slaughter of elephants thousands of miles away in Africa, where the largest land mammals on earth are facing their worst poaching epidemic in decades. It’s a crisis so grave experts now believe more are being killed than are being born.

How to slow the slaughter and curb the trade in “blood ivory” will be among the most critical issues up for debate at the 177-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, that gets under way Sunday in Bangkok. And Thailand, which is hosting the meeting, will be under particular pressure to take action.

That’s because this Southeast Asian country is notorious not only as a major hub for illegally trafficked wildlife; it’s also where much of the ivory smuggled out of Africa ends up — a destination second worldwide only to China, according to the wildlife monitoring network, TRAFFIC.

“Instead of being part of the problem, the Thai government can be part of the solution by banning ivory sales” altogether within its borders, said Janpai Ongsiriwittaya of the World Wildlife Fund.

Last week, the conservation group presented a global petition with more than half a million signatures to Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, calling on her government to do just that. The trade is currently legal here as long as it involves tusks that came from native herds that have been domesticated.

Yingluck responded by saying she recognized the importance of elephant conservation and would take the plea into consideration. Thai wildlife officials have said previously that an all-out ban on ivory is not possible because those Thais who legitimately own domesticated animals should also have the right to buy and sell tusks locally.

The problem, though, is that once ivory enters Thai markets — legally or not — it’s tough to figure out where it came from. Nevertheless, “most of the supply we see in Thai markets is illegally smuggled in from Africa,” Janpai said.

And “once tourists buy it, sellers claim it’s legal, and nobody …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News