Last Stand For Africa's Elephants

By EUGENE LINDEN

Striding majestically across the savanna, the African elephant is an unmistakable symbol of power and strength. As recently as the 1970s, its numbers were so great that some conservationists worried about overpopulation. Now the elephant is involved in a desperate struggle to survive, and the reason for its peril is one of its glories: the huge creature's magnificent tusks of ivory. Since the early 1980s, the price of ivory has surged from $25 per lb. to $80 per lb. As a result, growing bands of wily and ruthless poachers have taken to hunting down elephants illegally all across Africa, killing the animals with everything from automatic weapons to poison. About 10% of the remaining African elephants were killed last year, reducing their ranks to fewer than 750,000. If the slaughter continues at the present pace, the wild elephant could be close to extinction within a decade.

This week, to prevent such a tragedy, conservationists will unveil the most elaborate and costly plan in history to rescue a single species. Sponsored by the African Elephant Conservation Coordinating Group, a coalition of several international organizations, the plan calls for bolstering efforts to protect elephants against poachers, a study of ways to crack down on illegal trading of tusks, and a publicity campaign to alert people and governments to the relationship between the trade in ivory and the plight of the elephant. The AECCG hopes to raise at least $15 million in four years to finance its work.

The effort may be futile, though, unless demand for the animals' tusks is reduced sharply. Ivory is fashioned into everything from billiard balls and knife handles to necklaces and figurines. Craftsmen have even carved tusks into ornamental replicas of AK-47 assault rifles.

Theoretically, the business of taking ivory from animals alive or dead is highly regulated and ostensibly restricted by African governments. And under an international convention, there is a quota system that puts limits on the number of tusks each country can export.

So much for theory. In reality, the quota system has been ineffective in controlling the trade. Up to 90% of the tusks that enter the marketplace have been taken illegally by poachers, and smugglers have little trouble getting the ivory out of Africa. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi has reportedly financed his insurrection with ivory taken from more than 100,000 elephants. Some countries seem to be conduits for the illegal trade. With roughly 4,500 elephants of its own, Somalia has still managed to export tusks from an estimated 13,800 elephants in the past three years, evidence that the country has been providing false documents for ivory poached elsewhere. In response, the U.S. is expected this week to announce a ban on imports of Somalian ivory.

The leading destination for legal and perhaps illegal ivory is Asia. Hong Kong is a major manufacturer and exporter of ivory jewelry, and 30% of the colony's output goes to Americans. "People in the U.S. just don't connect ivory with elephants," says Mark Stanley Price, a director of the African Wildlife Foundation, "but every bracelet represents a dead elephant." Another top consumer is Japan, where ivory has long been used for personalized seals called hanko. But under pressure from conservationists, Hong Kong and Japan have begun to check closely the documents on ivory imports to weed out illegal shipments. Japan's legal ivory imports, in particular, have dropped sharply in the past three years.

Unfortunately, the decline in ivory trade in Japan and elsewhere may not reflect a drop in demand so much as the decimation of adult elephants. As mature elephants are killed, it becomes harder to satisfy the world's appetite for ivory. Stephen Cobb, who leads an ivory study for the AECCG, says the reduction in trade "is a clear sign of the collapse of exploitable elephant populations."

Some conservationists would like to see a total ban on the ivory trade. But that would be no easier to enforce than the laws against selling cocaine and heroin. Dealers bold enough to defy the embargo could anticipate higher | profits than ever. Moreover, poor African countries need the revenue from at least a limited amount of legal trading.

Realizing that if elephants vanish, so might tourists, some African nations are determined to slow down the killing. In addition, the animal is a vital part of Africa's unique ecosystem. For eons, elephants have knocked down trees, helping to give Africa its distinctive mix of forest and savanna and opening up the land for other big mammals.

Unwilling to let the elephant be wiped out, some governments have declared war on illegal killing. In Kenya armed patrols have orders to shoot poachers. Sometimes, though, the culprits are a formidable force themselves. At Kenya's Tsavo National Park, scores of poachers dressed in battle fatigues and armed with automatic weapons killed one policeman and wounded several others.

Besieged by armies of hunters, many herds are literally on the run. Conservationists use the phrase "refugee elephants" to describe animals fleeing Mozambique to crowd into protected areas in Zimbabwe. The killing of older animals with the biggest tusks threatens to reduce herds to what Tanzanian game manager Constantius Mlay describes as collections of naive teenagers without the wise old elephants needed as leaders in times of drought and food scarcity.

Conservationists cannot hope to protect elephants throughout their African homelands. For that reason, the AECCG, which includes such major conservation groups as the World Wildlife Fund, TRAFFIC and Wildlife Conservation International, envisions a triage approach. The group plans to concentrate its resources on about 40 populations that have the best chance of being guarded from poachers. That strategy would focus on saving about 250,000 elephants and would reluctantly leave another 500,000 to their fate.

This prospect is not so dismal as it sounds. If protected well, the remaining quarter-million elephants would be a large enough population to thrive and multiply again. In fact, David Western, director of WCI, asserts that if allowed to grow old and die naturally, the elephants in these herds could probably supply enough tusks to support an ivory market larger than today's illegal business.

With reporting by Carter Coleman/Dar es Salaam and Roger Browning/Nairobi