The Canadians received my letter and promised to ‘consider it’. That’s a start. I hope all your letters have gone out - I think it really makes people think when they get letters.
Here are some of the latest news stories which it seems all predict the worst
The Guardian says “A controversial decision to allow China to buy stockpiles of African elephant ivory looks set to go ahead this week after monitors from the group Traffic said the country had cracked down on its illegal domestic trade.
” China also has the recommendation of the Cites Secretariat which says that anti-smuggling initiatives by China, the largest blackmarket for illegal ivory, have been effective. Cites’s standing committee, meeting in Geneva, will decide if China’s controls on the illegal trade are stringent enough to prevent illegal ivory being laundered with stock from the sale or it being re-exported.
“In 2002, China was the principal driver of the illegal trade and made very few seizures,” said Tom Milliken, director of eastern and southern African operations for Traffic, which monitors the trade and advises Cites.
“Now it has been making seizures left, right and centre. They’ve added 100 seizures this year alone. On the domestic front China has moved aggressively.”
‘Big problem’
The increase in seizures in the past six years has been dramatic. According to the Elephant Trade Information System (Etis), the world’s largest database of elephant ivory seizures compiled by Traffic, China is now involved in around 63% of seizures. In 2002 the figure was 6%. Milliken said the contrast with some central African countries is stark: Nigeria has made 12 seizures in 20 years.
Milliken said that China was also cracking down on retailers and had developed systems of certification. “When we go back to stores we flagged up as having illegal ivory they aren’t selling it anymore or have been closed down. Product identification cards come with items legally sold and for items over a certain amount you get a photo ID.”
Dr Meng Xianlin, head of the Chinese delegation to the Cites meeting in Geneva, said China needed legal ivory to maintain ancient carving traditions. He accepted that Chinese demand for ivory presents a “big problem” for elephant conservation, but argues that “the stockpiles are a positive way to solve this problem.”
Nice argument ! 
He added: “There is high pressure to control the illegal trade and we have the mechanism to prohibit illegal ivory going into the legal channel.” However, he conceded “we cannot guarantee 100%” effectiveness.
Really persuasive
While those supporting approval of the sale believe that linking legal ivory supplies with China’s huge demand will reduce poaching and illegal trade, wildlife conservation groups say it still stimulates demand and will have the opposite effect.
“Milliken said the chances of a sale are high: “There’s real motivation for this sale. Last July a nine-year rest period after the sale was agreed by Cites so the southern African countries are keen to get this done. I think a sale will go ahead within months of this decision.”
:(:(:(:(
Meanwhile Michale McCarthey reporting in The Independent says what I’d like to say
If China’s application is approved, the resulting huge increase in the legal ivory trade will give the biggest possible shot in the arm to the enormous illicit trade which is supplied by poachers killing elephants across Africa – 23,000 a year at the most recent estimate.
With its own problems of poverty and disease, Africa has no money to enforce wildlife conservation, and the only way to stop mass-scale elephant poaching is by choking off demand for ivory. Many experienced conservationists – not to mention the 148 British MPs who have signed an early day motion in the Commons – feel that if China gets the go-ahead tomorrow, the African elephant will be getting a death sentence.
Chinese consumer demand for shark fins for soup is already driving down shark populations across the world. The demand from traditional Chinese medicine for tiger bones and other body parts is a principal reason for the collapse of tiger numbers in India, even in what are supposed to be protected areas. A report from Greenpeace in 2005 alleged that Chinese demand for tropical timber was already the biggest driver of rainforest destruction in Asia. And now this rapacious, remorseless and unending demand for natural resources is about to be unleashed on elephants.
The moment is all the more critical because it has come out of the blue – the world has not yet woken up to what is happening, and until the situation was disclosed on The Independent’s front page on Saturday, it had received virtually no publicity. The British Government appears to have been preparing to go along with China’s application to be an ivory buyer, hoping that, since it was happening in an obscure committee meeting in Geneva, no one would notice.
Even the Herald Tribune have a piece on China and ivory here Amazingly all these articles make it sound like Tom Milliken of TRAFFIC supports the sale of ivory to China but that’s not what I hear from his friends. So, why are the IUCN agencies saying one thing to the press and another to their colleagues? It feels like something very sinister is going on.
Daniel Cressey did a post about the China ivory debate in The Great Beyond which pointed me to this AP report that seriously raises doubts about China’s ability to control the illegl ivory trade.
It’s a great article - part of it is here
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — China’s government lost track of 121 tons of elephant ivory over a dozen years that probably was sold on illegal markets, according to a previously undisclosed Chinese report to U.N. regulatory officials.
The “shortfall” in ivory described in the document between 1991 and 2002 — equal to the tusks from about 11,000 dead elephants — could provide fodder for representatives of a U.N. accord to reject China’s attempt next week to gain permission to import more ivory.
“We have not been able to account for the shortfall through the sale of legal ivory by the selected selling sites in the country,” Chinese officials reported in 2003 to the Swiss-based U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES. “This suggests a large amount of illegal sale of the ivory stockpile has taken place.”
The Associated Press obtained the Chinese report from the Environmental Investigation Agency, a watchdog group based in Washington and London. EIA also has compiled a briefing for nations that signed on to CITES to try to prevent China from gaining permission to trade ivory at a CITES meeting in Geneva, Switzerland next week.
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Tags: Africa, China, CITES, elephants, ivory trade, wildlifedirect
