FEATURE - Kenya battles to keep ivory ban and save elephants
Date: 31-Oct-02
Country: KENYA
Author: Paul Casciato
The only difference between her and most other tiny tots is that Wendi is one of 30,000 elephants Kenya will try to protect when it seeks to stop African countries from resuming the international ivory trade at a meeting in Chile next month.
The one-month-old orphan has found a safe and happy home at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant nursery, unlike most of Kenya's elephants who battle poachers, angry farmers and shrinking migratory routes every day.
Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the Trust from an elephant nursery inside Nairobi National Park, said what happened to Wendi's mother is still a mystery, but that she was probably another victim of a burgeoning human population squeezing elephants into ever smaller refuges.
"They are being driven out, falling in wells, getting stuck...and being gunned down for their ivory," Sheldrick told Reuters.
She says all of Africa's elephants will be at greater risk unless Kenya can convince a meeting of signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Santiago next month to refuse proposals by five southern African countries to ease a 1990 ivory trading ban.
At a nearby launch for a conservation programme organised by the British-based animal charity Born Free, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) director Joe Kioko told Reuters that expectations that the ivory trade will resume has led to increased elephant poaching.
"I spend a lot of my time out in the field and every time there is a CITES meeting there seems to be an upsurge in poaching, and I cannot believe that there is any reason other than the fact that people anticipate that ivory is going to be traded on the international market," Kioko said.
He said he had received a report last Thursday saying three elephants had been killed in the past week alone. KWS figures show more than 80 elephants have been killed illegally in 2002 compared with 57 last year.
Kioko said weak customs laws, under-funded conservation programmes and the lack of an efficient system for tracking ivory shipments would make it impossible to deter poachers from trying to cash in on the trade if South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe manage to lift the ivory ban.
Kioko dismissed arguments by some of those countries, who say they need to cull elephants damaging their crops and that money from selling ivory is needed for conservation. He said their 87 tonnes of ivory stocks would bring in only about $2 million.
"Surely that's not enough for conservation," he said, adding that the CITES agreement did not restrict culling populations for management purposes.
He said even the KWS, which is arguably one of the most successful wildlife conservation services in Africa, still needs all the help it can get to ward off poaching.
Born Free, which believes that elephant conservation is the key to preserving most other forms of wildlife in Africa, said that whenever elephant poaching is on the rise, threats to other wildlife from such illegal practices as snaring also increase.
"We know that when elephants are threatened everything else in the wild is threatened," Winnie Kiiru, Born Free's east African project coordinator, told Reuters.
Sheldrick, who has been working with elephants in Kenya for 50 years and raised dozens of them said the gentle giants of the bush are a key species in the survival of other animals inhabiting Africa's delicate ecological balance.
"They create the waterholes that other animals use, the roads through the bush...you know in places like Tsavo (game park in southeastern Kenya) if there were no elephants the park would die and so would many other species."
She said the elephant population in Kenya alone has fallen to about 30,000 from 100,000 about 40 years ago and that Africa's overall population has dropped from three million to some 200,000, where each death can affect the whole population.
"To kill an elephant for its tooth...br
