Elephants and tourists

I haven't posted here for over two weeks as I have been travelling in Asia, helping my indefatigable colleagues, Lis McLellan and Wendy Elliott (assisted also by other colleagues from our office) to lay the groundwork for a campaign that WWF will (hopefully) launch this summer on illegal international wildlife trade.

Our first stop was Thailand, where we had assembled staff from our offices in that country and in Viet Nam (I prefer the two-word spelling). The issue with Thailand itself is ivory. Thanks to a legislative loophole that has been identified a number of years ago - but not yet fixed - it is legal to sell ivory from domestic elephants. Fair enough, you might say, except that there is no paperwork or chain of custody to distinguish such ivory from ivory of wild elephants, meaning that there's a no-brainer means available for laundering illegally obtained ivory. This illegal ivory does not come from Asian elephants (because the supply there is limited, since the females don't bear tusks and selective hunting in the past favours males that inherit only small tusks). Instead, it comes from Africa, and mostly from Central Africa at that. Both the export from Central Africa and the import to Thailand is entirely illegal but the ivory is rarely stopped on the way out. Once it reaches Thailand, if it gets past customs (or leaks subsequently from Government warehouses) it is "home free" on the streets. There is a cottage industry of carvers who make trinkets, mostly for the tourist market. It is illegal to buy this ivory and take it home but tourists are not necessarily made aware of this. Indeed, they must succeed as often as not in getting it home or the market would have dried up.

In exploring this issue with our Thai colleagues in WWF, I was struck - as always - by the impulsive enthusiasm of Thai people. They just needed the spur of a meeting like this and they were up in arms, ready to engage the public in a bid to rectify this situation.

However, the situation is urgent. Central Africa's elephants are bleeding. While we were on our trip, news was breaking of militia who had encroached into Camerooners from Chad and Sudan, killing over 200 elephants. The elephant populations in the region are in freefall (as are the hippos - and the region has already lost all its rhinos).