President Obama yesterday announced a $10-million initiative to prevent elephant and rhinoceros poaching in Africa, part of a larger program to fight animal trafficking around the globe. Max Fisher warns that the effort is in for a struggle:
The big problem is that time is running out. A 2011 study estimated that 7.4 percent of all African elephants may have been killed by poachers that year alone. From 1998 to 2007, the global ivory trade doubled, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Since 2007, it has doubled again. And the trade is shifting from small smuggler networks to large-scale operations: seizures of 800-plus kilos of illegal ivory shipments (that’s about 1 ton) have doubled just since 2009. Elephants and rhinos are simply being wiped out, and quickly.
The other problem is economics, the simple force of which might be too much to overcome. Some of the countries trafficking in ivory and rhino tusks are among the poorest per capita in the world. Elephant tusks are worth $1,000 per pound, Ginette Hemley of the World Wildlife Fund told my colleague Juliet Eilperin; rhino horns sell for $30,000 per pound, about twice as much as gold. By comparison, Afghan opium farmers can charge about $606 per pound.
Meanwhile, researchers say that Cold War-era nuclear fallout could help the elephants. Scott K. Johnson explains:
[A] group of researchers have shown in a study published this week that the carbon-14 spike caused by atomic tests can be used to determine the age of biological materials from the mid-1950s on. … The technique has an immediate application in the troubling but lucrative world of ivory smuggling. Many nations have banned the trading of new ivory in an effort to stop the poaching that still threatens elephant populations. They make an exception, however, for ivory that existed before the ban went into effect. That obviously creates a pretty massive loophole for ivory smugglers, who just need to make it look like the ivory is old enough to be legal. A tiny sample analyzed for carbon-14 could definitively date the ivory, making it harder for smugglers to circumvent the law.
Earlier Dish on poaching here, here, and here.
(Photo by Lenny Montana)
The Dish 