More than 20,000 elephants a year are being slaughtered for their tusks in Africa, a team of scientists reported yesterday, despite a 1989 ban on trading ivory.
The researchers say they hope a new technique that uses DNA in contraband tusks to determine their country of origin will identify poaching hot spots and illegal trade routes, and help authorities in African countries crack down on poachers.
Black market ivory is now going for $750 (U.S.) a kilogram, up from $200 a kilo in 2004, and from $100 in 1989. That's when the ban on the international trade of ivory took effect under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
The researchers say Africa's elephants are in more danger now than they were in the mid-1980s when the issue first gained attention.
"The trade has become the worst in history, and part of the problem that is really unique is that organized crime has gotten very heavily involved in the trade," says Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author of a paper published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a U.S. journal.
People have hunted elephants for hundreds of years, but by the mid-1970s gangs of poachers armed with automatic weapons were killing thousands of animals. They hacked off the tusks and left the corpses to rot.
Public outrage in countries around the world fuelled the push for the 1989 ban on trading ivory internationally.
Millions of aid dollars poured into African countries to help crack down on poachers and save the elephants. It paid for weapons and vehicles for law-enforcement officials. By 1993, it seemed the problem was solved, and the money dried up, Dr. Wasser says.
But demand for ivory continued to grow, especially in Japan and China, where having a personal seal carved from ivory is a status symbol.
"It is like wearing a Rolex watch," says Bill Clark, a researcher based in Israel who is the co-author on the paper published yesterday.
The price on the black market has escalated dramatically, and so has the price offered poachers, who are now getting $35 to $50 (U.S.) a kilo, compared with $5 or $6 in the 1980s.
Dr. Wasser was asked to help in 2002, when the authorities in Singapore seized a huge shipment of contraband ivory. Investigators from a number of countries wanted to know where it had come from, and he had developed a technique for matching the genetic material found in tusks to the DNA found in feces of elephants, allowing him to pinpoint where the tusks came from.
There were 532 tusks in the shipment, plus more than 40,000 hunks of ivory already cut up to make the ivory seals. Between 3,000 and 6,500 elephants were likely killed to get that much ivory, the scientists say.
The DNA showed the elephants came from central Zambia, a country that has not been given permission to sell its ivory stockpiles internationally. The government wanted to sell ivory taken from animals killed prior to 1989, and said that only 135 elephants had been illegally killed over the past 10 years.
No one has been arrested in relation to the smuggled ivory. But Dr. Wasser says he hopes his technique will make it harder for countries to deny that poaching is taking place.
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Africa's elephants threatened
The supply: Between August, 2005, and August, 2006, authorities seized 12 major shipments of African elephant ivory headed for the Far East. That's 23,461 kilograms, but only 10 per cent of the illegal ivory that was successfully smuggled out of Africa. This means poachers killed an estimated 23,000 elephants for their tusks.
The demand: In Japan, China and other Asian countries, ivory is prized as a sign of upward mobility. Pieces about 6½ cm long are carved and used as a personal seals on important documents. In Japan, these seals are square, and called hankos. In China they are round, and known as chop.
The Singapore seizure: In 2002, authorities seized a container packed with 6½tons of contraband ivory, including 42,120 hankos, the second-largest illegal ivory shipment on record, which had been delivered from Zambia to Malawi in small lots. They were then shipped to Singapore, see the photo below, via South Africa.
The science: Researchers used DNA from the contraband tusks to determine the animals were from a small area of central Africa, most likely central Zambia. They say their technique could help authorities identify poaching hot spots and trade routes.
