Africa sees the return of the elephant killers

The growing trade in ivory is fuelling an alarming rise in elephant poaching which could undermine attempts to save the world's biggest land animal from extinction, according to a study published today. Scientists believe that poaching of African elephants has returned to a scale not seen in decades and that the number of animals being killed could cause some regional populations to become extinct.

They believe that elephants across vast areas of Africa are once again endangered despite the significant increase in numbers recorded by the small number of countries with good conservation records. The study was carried out by scientists who have pioneered a new DNA technique of tracing the geographic origins of elephant ivory. They found that intensive poaching can and does occur over a relatively small area of land.

The scientists warn that the illegal trade has escalated to the "devastating levels" that occurred before the 1989 ban on the sale of ivory imposed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

"The illegal ivory trade recently intensified to the highest levels ever reported," says the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team led by Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Policing this trafficking has been hampered by the inability to reliably determine geographic origin of contraband ivory. Ivory can be smuggled across multiple international borders and along numerous trade routes, making poaching hotspots and potential trade routes difficult to identify,"the study says.

Dr Wasser and his colleagues have built up a map of elephant DNA based on dung samples taken from different regions of Africa. They have also pioneered a method of extracting DNA from elephant ivory and have used it to analyse samples seized in police raids across the world. They used the methods to determine the geographic origins of the biggest ivory seizure since the 1989 ban - a consignment of more than 6.5 tons packed into a 20ft container shipped from Malawi to Singapore via South Africa. The consignment included 532 tusks and 42,120 smaller pieces of solid ivory that had been shaped into Japanese "hankos", blank signature stamps used to sign works of art and other valuable paperwork.

Police worked out that the ivory had been carried from Zambia to Malawi in small lots before it was shipped, but they did not know where in Africa the tusks had originated - whether from one location or across several. Dr Wasser's team determined that the entire consignment had been butchered from savannah elephants living in a narrow east-west band of southern Africa, centred on Zambia. Some of the tusks in the consignment weighed up to 11kg, which is more than twice the weight normally seen on the black market, indicating that they came from a large number of older animals.

Just before the consignment was seized, Zambia had petitioned for permission to sell its ivory stockpiles, which were supposed to have dated from before the 1989 trade ban. But the application said that only 135 elephants were known to have been killed in Zambia in the previous 10 years, which is far fewer than the number that would have been slaughtered to make up the single, illegal consignment seized in 2002, Dr Wasser said.

"If it really is organised crime that's driving this, then the only hope we have of stopping it is to stop the ivory at the source, to not let it into the international market. Because once it's in the international market, the trade is very hard to stop," he added.

The growth of Asian economies, particularly the Chinese, has been a major factor boosting the ivory trade, with prices rising from $100 a kilogram in 1989 to $750 in 2004, Dr Wasser said. Between August 2005 and August 2006, police and customs seized 12 major consignments of ivory destined for the Far East, weighing nearly 24 tons.

The Born Free Foundation, an animal conservation charity, estimates that only 10 per cent of illegal consignments are seized. A total trade of 240 tons of ivory would require the slaughter of some 23,000 elephants, or about 5 per cent of the total estimated wild African population. "It's a huge number of elephants. This is why we don't want a return to the limited international trade in ivory being proposed by some countries,"said Will Travers, the chief executive of Born Free.

Dr Wasser said that the size of the single consignment seized in 2002 showed that there was an elaborate black market network already well established that was able to pass on and sell thousands of expensive ivory products.

"If people really realised what is happening they would be ashamed to be part of the crisis. We don't want to spend our time catching criminals, we want to stop the crime from happening. That's the most effective enforcement you can do," he said.

Poor nations such as Zambia will find it difficult to fend off organised criminals fuelled by a booming market in the Far East. Western nations should do more to help such nations police any bans, he added.

Intensive elephant poaching is bound to have a knock-on effect for other wildlife in the same habitat. "Elephants are majestic animals and are not trivial to the ecosystem. They are a keystone species and taking them out significantly alters the habitat," Dr Wasser said. "It has ripple effects on lots of different species."

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