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It is not the intention of the AEC to reopen discussion of international trade in ivory under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (CoP15). However, with the prospect of the spirit of the moratorium being put in question by some Parties during the next session of the Conference of the Parties scheduled on 13-15 March in Doha, Qatar, the members of the AEC feel obliged to act to preserve the moratorium adopted at The Hague. This would ensure that all Parties to CITES are unequivocally covered as intended by this moratorium.

 

CoP15 will take place in Doha, Qatar from 13 to 25 March. It is time to agree once and for all on the most effective way to protect elephants under CITES. Certainly, no proposals for elephant trade should be considered until CoP18 in 2019 in the spirit of the decision adopted by consensus at CoP14. Proposals from the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia should therefore be withdrawn.

 

The AEC believes that a quick decision on this topic will ensure that elephant conservation measures are sustained as intended in CoP14 and will allow CoP15 to proceed efficiently with the other items on its agenda.

 

 

The spirit of the agreement mediated by the EU at the last Conference of the Parties in 2007 was that no elephant trade proposals would be submitted by any Party to CITES, at least for the duration of the 9-year moratorium that was agreed at that time.

 

In the even that discussions take place on Proposals 4, 5, and 6, the AEC is calling on all CITES Parties to support Proposal 6 submitted to CoP15. This proposal aims to ensure that the spirit of the 2007 agreement is spelt out unequivocally, thereby closing a loophole that slipped into the current text that is now being exploited by the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia (Proposals 4 and 5).

 

A moratorium must apply to all Parties to the Convention, and to all proposals relating to ivory trade. 

 

By proposing to transfer the elephant populations of the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia from Appendix I to Appendix II, Proposals 4 and 5, in effect, are preparing the ground to recommence trade in ivory in the near future. Acceptance of this at CoP15 in Doha would send the wrong signal to the unscrupulous traders and poachers who flout the law. It would suggest that the international community is not serious about the moratorium or about elephant conservation.

 

In view of the dramatic resurgence in poaching (for instance the level of poaching in Kenya is the worst it has ever been since the international ban with 232 poached elephants in 2009, 145 in 2008, 47 in 2007; in Chad, the population of Zakouma national park has plummeted from an estimated 3800 individuals in 2005 to around 617 today) and illegal trade that has followed the CITES-approved one-off sales in 2008, the AEC is calling for an extension of the existing 9-year moratorium to twenty years. The twenty-year timeframe is fully justified. A whole generation of elephants across the continent need to be given a chance to re-establish itself, which needs twenty years.

 

It is essential, at the very least, that the current 9-year moratorium be respected, and that there is no legal trade whatsoever. Legal trade provides cover for the unlawful trafficking of ivory, which directly stimulates the resurgence of poaching across the African continent.   This poaching is happening now on a major scale as a result of the “one-off” legal sales of ivory that took place in late 2008. A clear signal must be given that there will be no more proposals that would lead to legal trade in ivory in the near future. Only this will enable law enforcement agencies around the world to clamp down on organised criminal syndicates and illicit ivory markets.

 

Left unabated, trade-fuelled poaching will continue to undermine the important work that has been carried out by CITES over the past thirty years to preserve the African elephant. While elephant populations may appear relatively healthy in some locations (notably southern Africa), they are at best precarious or already extinct in many regions of the continent. These are the facts : the recent population of elephants that went extinct in the Sambisa area in Nigeria. In Sierra Leone, elephants might have already disappeared.

 

Allowing trade in ivory from countries where elephant populations may appear to be relatively healthy, encourages poaching in all countries, with especially disastrous results in those areas where local elephant populations are threatened with immediate extinction. For Sierra Leone, it may already be too late – recent poaching is believed to have wiped out the remaining elephant population entirely. In Senegal, only a handful of elephants cling to survival.

 

The ivory trade moratorium was approved following widespread international concern about rising and serious levels of elephant poaching sweeping across Africa. The purpose of the compromise nine-year moratorium was to create a resting period during which elephant populations could stabilise to some degree and during which no further proposals relating to resumption of ivory trade would be submitted to CITES. This would also allow for the assessment and better understanding of the impact of the 2008 one-off ivory sales on poaching, illegal ivory trade and elephant conservation across the continent of Africa.