To the Secretary by Mary Thompson-Jones

Author:Mary Thompson-Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Elephants

Perhaps no animal is more beloved and more controversial than the elephant, targeted by poachers and hunters for its ivory; targeted by farmers and villagers for its tendency to trample crops and farmland; and seemingly capable of rebounding from worrisome low numbers to gigantic herds in need of ever-vaster acreage. Embassies ranging from Zimbabwe to Burma chronicled the struggle over elephants among countries, conservationists, and poachers.

CITES has banned the sale of ivory since 1989, but under pressure from conservationists, African nations, and China, it allowed a one-time sale in 2008 of stockpiled African ivory, with proceeds to be earmarked for wildlife conservation. According to conservationists, the sale of some one hundred tons of ivory proved disastrous because such a limited offering merely stoked Chinese demand and opened the floodgates of illegal ivory from African nations.21

Ivory is only one aspect of the problem. In Asia, where wild elephants number 25,000 to 35,000, they are also seen as traditional and ideal beasts of burden. India has 20,000, followed by Burma, where the embassy reported that their numbers in the wild dwindled from 5,500 in 1996 to 4,000 in 2009. Elephants in Burma are used in the timber industry as draft animals, and conservationists complain that abuse and overwork result in high mortality, while the logging also destroys elephant habitat.22

The Burma state timber company owns 2,500 elephants, and an additional 2,000 are privately owned and rented out to the timber industry. A Burmese wildlife NGO official told the embassy that as the regime uses the timber industry to meet the increasing demand for hard currency—essential for its economic integration and development—there is constant pressure to capture additional wild elephants and use them to fell more trees. Burmese officials defend the practice, saying elephants are more environmentally friendly than heavy machinery. That’s one view, but if the combined elephant abuse and loss of trees does not dismay conservationists, there is also the proximity of Burma’s border to China with its high demand for ivory.

Sometimes the greatest threat to elephants comes from climate change. Mali’s Gourma region, straddling the area between the country’s fertile southern savannah and the semi-arid Sahel, somehow supports the northernmost herd of elephants in West Africa and the only elephant group in the Sahel. The survival of the 550 to 700 Gourma elephants hinges on a nomadic migration circuit of six hundred kilometers—the longest annual migration of elephants ever recorded, according to embassy reports.23 The elephants follow a vast, counterclockwise route punctuated with watering holes and seasonal grasslands, but after centuries of elephant-human harmony, recent trends of reduced rainfall alongside more farms, livestock, and settlements have meant heavier competition for scarce water. Embassy officers reported that NGO groups had used satellite technology and radio collars to identify choke points on the migration corridors, reasoning that any negative human-elephant interaction could increase the already high mortality rate. The NGOs worked alongside the World Bank on a $10 million biodiversity project that relied on local knowledge, leadership, and commitment of the Gourma population, working with tribal chiefs from eighteen communes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.