Baraza

Category: Ivory, elephants | Date: Jul 11 2008 | By: baraza

Probably the Standing Committee country with the strongest views about China is Kenya. And with good reason too.

I have just spoken to Patrick Omondi there who is in charge of Elephants. He told me that the CITES Secretariat had moved to a vote on letting China recieve the ivory at the last Standing Committee meeting. They lost by one solitary vote!

It turns out that Cameroon didn’t vote. Cameroon is no longer on the SC, this time round its DRC that is worrying. The DRC often votes with it’s friends down south even though the country with the most at stake is DRC - we’ve already been hearing about an escalation of poaching on the Atamato and Gorilla blogs.

Germany is another country that used to be a friend of elephants but is likely to turn against them this time. On it’s own it’s not a big problem, but Germany currently heads the EU, and EU votes as a block. So, they are extremely dangerous because they visited China and actually influenced the SC position on Chinas ability to control illegal ivory trade.

We know that this is a load of crock!

Patrick didn’t sound very hopeful in our discussion. He revealed that just this March 350 kg of ivory was siezed en route to China from DRC! The CITES Secretariat is aware but is just being quiet about it. He said that the Kenya Wildlife Service is seriously worried about a vote going in favour of China because they believes that the presence of legal ivory in China will make it impossible to tell what’s legal and what’s not, making it virtually impossible to monitor the illegal trade as there will be more smuggling and laundering legal with illegal ivory.

The KWS prediction? If China wins the right to buy the southern African ivory, there will be an escalation of smuggling because of the enormous market for ivory in China, combined with the massive and growing Chinese presence in Africa - especially DRC, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Asked how we could help Patrick replied, lobby all European governments as they can influence the EU block even if they attend only as observers. Also, lobby the USA government as they wield a lot of power.

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Tags: China, CITES, elephants, ivory trade