Parts of more than 1400 Tigers have been seized across Asia in the past 13 years, according to TRAFFIC‘s latest analysis of confiscations, which includes new data for 2010-2012. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
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
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
