Baraza

Category: China, Ivory, Trade, elephants, wildlife trade | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: Maina

Today, 28 October 2008, Namibia opened bidding for the 9 tonnes of ivory stockpiles it wants to auction in the controversial CITES backed one-off sale. The media has been shut out of this auction. According to a report appearing in the Namibian, a national paper, The Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) never made an official announcement about the international auction. Most people would wonder if the government is ashamed or it’s trying to hide something.

Tonnes of applications and requests by international and national media houses piled into the Ministry’s in boxes but nobody was going to bother. When asked on Monday, the Deputy Environment and Tourism Minister Leon Jooste told media representatives that “It is too late to change the Ministry’s strategy with regard to the ivory auction.”

Local and regional conservation NGOs will also not be let into the auction. A request by the southern Africa office of the International Association for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to be allowed observer status was curtly rejected some two weeks ago. “The [MET] official just flatly denied us the possibility,” Christina Pretorius, Programme Manager of IFAW Southern Africa, is quoted as having told The Namibian on Monday.

Botswana will sell it’s 44 tonnes on Friday 30 October while South Africa, with the largest sale of 51 tonnes, and ZIMBABWE, 4 tonnes, will follow suit on 2 and 5 November respectively. In total, a whooping 108 tonnes of ivory will enter the market. The effect of this massive influx of ivory in the Chinese and Japanese markets, according to most conservationists, will be a corresponding increase in poaching to affect the rest of Africa. Traffic, the trade monitoring body under CITES however maintains that there is no evidence to support these allegations. Whatever happened to taking precautions?

The southern Africa states participating in this one off sale of ivory stockpiles first approved - in principle - by CITES in 2002, made $ 5-million in the last one off sale some 9 years ago in 1999. This year, according to the BBC, they expect to make $ 30-million - quite an increase occasioned just by the entry of China into the fray. They say this money will go towards elephant conservation. Traffic says that the ivory will not leave China and Japan into other markets. The two governments have promised to ensure that that does not happen but that is another story. There is evidence - overwhelming evidence - that illegal ivory trade is still alive and far outsells the legal trade.

The wisdom of this sale is quite questionable. If elephants are still endangered in most African states, then there is no logic really to let the sale of ivory - with the potential of fanning poaching - to anyone. Inasmuch as the data that Traffic presented does not show any increase in illegal trade, the fact remains that illegal trade will not go away just because the stockpiles have been sold and $30-million is injected into conservation (and this - if the money does indeed end up in conservation - will be in states where elephant populations are already growing).

Moreover, reports from Zimbabwe indicate that a large percentage of the wildlife has been eaten by desperate country folk or hunted illegally by unscrupulous safari hunting companies as the country’s governance sunk into an abyss. How can anyone justify allowing Zimbabwe to sell ivory? Besides, who knows when South Africa, Namibia and Botswana would end up with a dysfunctional government resulting in massive poaching and - perhaps - eventual extinction of elephants?

The insertion that selling these stockpiles will help conservation is myopic. This sale will only keep demand for ivory alive. And when the southern states have no more ivory to sell, who will feed China’s growing hunger for ivory? Is it not the rest of Africa where elephants are not properly protected? Is it not poaching?

One Kevin C from Taipei commenting on the BBC article puts things rather candidly:

Sounds like It is also a very good idea to sell drug stockpiles in police office. It will reduce the market value and make it less profitable to smuggle and produce it underground.

You are always welcome to have your say. This is a matter that needs all your input. Tell us what you think.

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Tags: auction, China, CITES, hunting, Ivory, ivory stockpiles, Japan, Namibia, poaching, southern Africa, wildlife trade, Zimbabwe

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Category: Emergencies, Forests, Gorillas, Trade, wildlife | Date: Oct 10 2008 | By: baraza

We are all been glued to the depressing headlines every day about the housing crisis, economic credit crunch, collapsing banks. On the bright side we are witnessing an unprecedented level of global cooperation to manage bailouts and rescue packages to save the worlds’ economies.I don’t think I’m alone in wondering how come we couldn’t get this level of cooperation on global climate change. Surely it is having an even greater impact on global economies.

The current financial news focuses on industrial nations of North America and Europe but here in Africa (and I’m sure it’s similar in other developing countries) we are already feeling the impact. We’re experiencing massive inflation which affects us all. Yesterday I heard about a middle class Kenyan family who are now feeding their children on anything that fills their stomach. Although they are a well educated couple, they cannot afford to balance their children’s diet. It’s a vicious cycle – the kids will be undernourished, will perform poorly at school. This will cap their own prospects and limit their capacity to escape poverty.

So, we are reacting to the financial crisis because it affects each of us individually. We approve the bail out rescue packages, and have allowed our governments to take billions of dollars from our taxes to rescue failing financial institutions.

Many environmentalists and conservationists are amazed that we can galvanize global coordination to prevent a global financial crisis; and furious that the same countries couldn’t come together and agree on a rescue package to address other global crises like climate change and poverty in developing countries.

This story appeared today on the BBC website and it stirred me to write this post because while the financial situation may be a global crisis, it is nothing compared to the unfolding environmental crisis . A new report by TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) informs us that are racing towards catastrophic damage to our economies because of what how we are destroying biodiversity and ecosystem services.

What are ecosystem services and how dependent are we on them?

Our very existence is tied to ecosystems.

They clean our water and air; give us fertile soils; provide us with building materials and clothing (timber, cotton); pollinate our crops (bees); store carbon and stop the world from over-heating. The list goes on.

33 Billion - the annual value of these ecosystem services in US Dollars

16 Billion – the annual value of the global economy

In this study by Robert Costanza and others  of 17 ecosystem services in 16 biomes, the value of ecosystem services that are not already captured in economic markets is US $15 – 54 Trillion (that’s twelve 0’s!) with an average of US $33 trillion. They emphasize that this is a minimum estimate. To put this into perspective remember that the Global economy is worth about US $16 trillion – half of what nature gives us for free.

To make this real, consider pollination services – without pollinators like bees, we would have virtually no vegetables and of course no honey! The value of pollination of our commercial crops is estimated to be US $216 billion every year. We can survive without bees, of course but imagine if we had to do all that pollination by hand!

It is this value that we do not capture in our economic evaluations. These ecosystem services are considered free public goods! There are no markets and no prices. We simply don’t count them in our national economies and they don’t feature in our economic planning.

We are trashing our ecosystems and losing a host of free services

By 2050 11% of the natural areas remaining in 2000 could be lost to agricultural expansion, the expansion of infrastructure, and climate change.

Almost 40% of the land currently under low-impact agriculture could be converted to intensive agricultural use, with further biodiversity losses

60% of coral reefs could be lost - even by 2030 - through fishing, pollution, diseases, invasive alien species, and coral bleaching due to climate change.

And climate change is exacerbating this problem.

What are the global financial implications?

In an interview here, the lead author of the TEEB report Pavan Sukhdev warns that “the fisheries that are basically going to die out in 40 years time don’t just mean $80 to 100 billion worth of lost fishing income, but also lost protein for the world’s billion poorest people”.

Nearly one-third of the world’s fisheries are severely depleted, and some have suffered complete collapse, such as the Grand Banks cod stocks off Canada’s eastern coast. If current trends continued, we will have no commercially viable marine fisheries left within fifty years.

The loss of biodiversity will have serious repercussions on the world’s economy. The TEEB report predicts we are losing forest ecosystem services at a rate of between $2 trillion and $5 trillion per year. This is the combined value of their services, including cleaning water and absorbing carbon dioxide. The situation will worsen with time as our natural stock is depleted, and we lose the services they provide. It’s a little like losing the interest from an investment, as you eat into the capital. Except that the value of the services a forest provides, is worth many times what we would make if we were to chop down the timber and sell it on the open market.

We tend to undervalue things that we get for free.

We understand the value of those things that we spill our sweat for. The TEEB report suggests that we have flawed economic analysis and we’ve been making policy mistakes. Because environmental services are ‘free’ their loss often is not detected by our current economic incentive system, losses due to deforestation, unsustainable harvesting, habitat destruction etc will continue unabated. To add salt to this wound, the world’s poor are most at risk from the continuing loss of biodiversity, as they are the ones that are most dependent on the ecosystem services that are being degraded.

How big is the problem?

Between 1900 and today we have destroyed 50% of the worlds wetlands. In addition 30% of the our coral reefs are damaged and 35% of our magroves deforested. Extinction rates are now 1000 times greater than they should be and the IUCN states that 70% of the worlds plants are in jeopardy. This is already affecting food, water and health. By 2050 7.5 million square kilometers be lost – that’s the size of Australia.

The TEEB report suggests that the cost of the loss of biodiversity today dwarfs the current financial crisis and that we urgently need a rescue package for environment.

You can read the full TEEB report here or the executive summary here.

Bailing out ecosystems

We know that our very well being is totally dependent upon these “ecosystem services” and that we are hurtling towards a crisis, and yet we are not even talking about any sort of rescue package for ecosystems. No one has dared quantify how much that would cost us.

However, the TEEB report warns that if we do not adopt the right policies, the current decline in biodiversity and the related loss of ecosystem services will continue and even accelerate. Some ecosystems are likely to be damaged beyond repair. With a “business as usual” scenario, by 2050 we, or our children and grand children will be faced with serious consequences.

I agree with Corey, the TEEB report is “Yet more evidence that we have to stop the extinction crisis“

Although it sounds horrendous, we mustn’t see this situation as hopeless. Ecosystems are far more robust than banks and economies. If we lose millions of dollars in ecosystem services by chopping down a forest, we can recover that value with a relatively small investment in forest restoration.  It’ll take years but nature also has her own inbuilt repair mechanisms. We can help her to speed up the recovery by planting, protecting and managing the restoration.

Here’s an example of what can be achieved after only 30 years of forest restoration in Africa.

Tree planting with nitrogen fixing casuarina after open cast mining has stripped all the surface soil and rock at Lafarge in Mombasa Kenya

30 years later the restored ecosystem provides many services - cleaning water, producing fish, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, recreation and income generation. It is a global showcase and should be replicated and scaled up. You can see more about this amazing place here

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Tags: biodiversity, rescue plan, TEEB report, wildlifedirect

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Category: China, Ivory, Trade, elephants, wildlife trade | Date: Jul 30 2008 | By: Maina

In an earlier post, I reported that the US is second only to China in the size of the ivory blackmarket. Well, although most American buyers were said to be unaware of the legality of their ivory purchases, it turns out that there are glaring legal loopholes that traders are exploiting to fan the blackmarket.

Acclaimed wildlife trade investigators, Dr Esmond Bradley Martin and Daniel Stiles, spent several months in the US visiting 16 of America’s main towns and cities where ivory is sold between 2006 and 2007. Their report, Ivory Markets in the USA, has just been published. The report shows that even though the US is far ahead in its control of illegal ivory trade compared to Africa and Asia (US only comparable to Europe), its large population and vast buying power renders stringent control of ivory trade critical.

And there are controls. The US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and various other legislation conform with CITES stipulations but there is leeway that can be exploited. Antique worked ivory (at least 100 years old), for example, can legally be imported and sold (according to both CITES and US laws). This leaves the market wide open for fake antiques (fabricated using smoke, dyes and exposure to heat and acidity). Trophy tusks can also be imported legally from the southern African countries that allow hunting but the raw ivory cannot be used commercially. This opens shady alleys where ivory from anywhere can easily find its way into the market with fake documents of origin. The same law allows sale of trophy tusks imported before July 1975, when CITES came into force, which again makes it that much easier to sell all and any purported trophy.

Twenty-two states have integrated federal wildlife laws into state laws and there is generally good cooperation between state and federal agencies. When wildlife specimens originate outside the US, however, law enforcement agencies find it hard to deal with and ivory is no exception. “Once ivory enters the US, it can move free of inspection within the 50 states. Neither state nor federal agencies regularly inspect shops or antiques fairs for wildlife products.” say Martin and Stiles in an article published in Swara magazine.

In a country where 24,000 worked ivory items on sale in 657 outlets were recorded by this particular investigation, it is no wonder that the market should be second only to China’s statistics. Of the 16 cities investigated, New York had by far the most ivory for sale: a minimum of 11,376 ivory items in 124 outlets, which is almost 5 times higher than the second highest, San Fransisco Bay Area with 2,777 items in 49 outlets. Greater LA records a close 2,605 items although in more outlets (170) closing the top three. Ivory workers are however difficult to find since they mostly work from home and are widely scattered throughout the 50 state colossus.

Interestingly, most of the recent imports of ivory into the US came from China! Since the US has never conducted any census on ivory and maintains no stockpile, it is difficult to know how much ivory is out there.

Granted, the US authorities hold the record for the highest number of ivory seizures in the world. But they also seize large quantities of illegal drugs but that does not mean that they are winning the war on drugs. Illegal ivory, like these drugs, still gets in.

The problem is that although CITES resolutions have called for various actions to control ivory trade, the US has implemented none of them. Particularly, according to the article by Martin and Stiles in Swara magazine, the US should pay attention to these actions:
1) Prohibit the unregulated domestic sale of ivory. the owner of the ivory should prove lawful possession
2) Register or license all importers, wholesalers, and retailers dealing in ivory items
3) Establish nationwide procedure, especially in retail outlets, informing tourists and other non-nationals not to purchase ivory in cases where it is illegal for them to import it into their own home countries
4) Introduce recording and inspection procedures to enable government agencies to monitor the flow of ivory within the country

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Tags: CITES, elephants, Ivory, US, wildlife trade

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