06 Apr 2006 - Gland,
Switzerland/Cambridge, UK– Four years on from
the end of the Angolan Civil War, the bloody plight
of the country’s elephants is worsening with a
doubling in the illegal ivory trade over the last
12 to 18 months, according to TRAFFIC and WWF.
The TRAFFIC report — No Peace
for Elephants: Unregulated Domestic Ivory Markets
— looked at the curio markets in Angola’s capital
Luanda for the first time and shows that the volume
of elephant ivory available in local markets is
escalating.
Over 1.5 tonnes of worked ivory
products, representing the tusks of at least 300
African elephants, were observed during the June
2005 survey.
“Illegal ivory markets expand
when business is booming and government authorities
look the other way,” said Tom Milliken, Director
of TRAFFIC East/Southern Africa and one of the
report authors. “The war continues for elephants
as all of the ivory traded through these local
markets is coming from illicit sources.”
Of the 37 countries that still
harbour wild populations of African elephants,
Angola is the only one that remains a non-Party
to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In fact,
Angola is the only nation in sub-Saharan Africa
to remain outside of the convention, the world’s
foremost mechanism for regulating trade in endangered
and threatened wildlife species.
“We’re very concerned because
unregulated domestic ivory markets in Africa are
the drivers behind the illegal killing of some
12,000 elephants annually,” said Milliken. “The
Angolan connection is a new, growing and worrying
dimension in the illegal ivory trade as it currently
exists beyond the reach of CITES.”
To support elephant conservation,
the 169 Parties to CITES adopted an action plan
to shut down Africa’s unregulated ivory markets
at the 13th meeting of the Conference of the Parties
in October 2004.
“Angola is clearly out of step
with the rest of Africa, failing to join CITES
and failing to support the continent-wide action
plan to shut down the very markets that drive
elephant poaching today,” said PJ Stephenson,
Head of WWF International’s Africa Elephant Programme.
The TRAFFIC study found that nearly three-quarters
of the ivory vendors in Luanda were French-speaking
Congolese from the Democratic Republic of the
Congo and many of the ivory products appeared
to originate from Congo Basin countries. Most
ivory curios were being purchased by American,
European and Chinese buyers, presumably for illegal
export to their native countries. These facts
underscore the cross-border, regional and global
dynamics of the ivory trade.
End Notes:
• Within southern Africa, Angola
and Mozambique have the largest illicit trades
in elephant ivory, according to TRAFFIC. Nearly
20 per cent of the 3,254 products observed in
Mozambique last year were in the duty-free departure
lounge area of the capital’s international airport
in clear defiance of CITES regulations. But in
the wake of the TRAFFIC assessment, Mozambique
authorities have taken measures to curb this trade
and recent reports indicate the Maputo airport
is now free of ivory.
• TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade
monitoring network, works to ensure that trade
in wild plants and animals is not a threat to
the conservation of nature. TRAFFIC is a joint
programme of WWF, the global conservation organization
and IUCN – The World Conservation Union.
• The Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and
Flora (CITES) regulates international trade in
more than 30,000 species of wild animals and plants.
The convention is currently applied in 169 nations,
including all the African elephant range States
except Angola.
• Angola’s wild elephant population
has not been surveyed for decades and due to the
lack of recent information, IUCN’s African Elephant
Database (AED) indicates that only 250 elephants
are found in the country. This figure certainly
represents an under-estimation, but accurate census
work in former, heavily-mined, conflict zones
is costly and fraught with many difficulties.
On the other hand the data for Mozambique is much
better and, according to the AED data, the elephant
population could comprise as many as 24,400 animals,
if ‘possible’ and ‘speculative’ numbers are considered.
