Science / Medicine : A Weekly Roundup of News, Features and Commentary : A Crisis in East Africa : New Census Shows That Poaching Has Taken Heavy Toll on Elephants

A new census of elephants in East Africa reveals that the elephant population in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda has dropped by 87% or more in the last 15 years, and the report predicts that the animal will become extinct in those countries within 10 years if poaching practices persist.

The census further says this unprecedented “population crash” includes many national parks and game reserves in those countries. It also suggests that the situation may be equally grim for elephants throughout Africa.

“This is happening so fast no one can believe it. Sanctuaries have been turned into shooting galleries. If the demand for ivory is fed, it’s going to wipe out elephants in East Africa,” said Richard Estes, chairman of the antelope specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

The new census was conducted by elephant specialist Iain Douglas-Hamilton and commissioned by the European Economic Community and World Wildlife Fund. His report appears in the East African Wildlife Society’s journal, Swara, which hit the newsstands in Nairobi in late March.

Douglas-Hamilton said he was able to spot only 100 elephants in the Kilifi District of coastal Kenya in 1987--where 10,000 elephants were known to have existed in 1973.

And in Uganda’s Murchison Falls South National Park--an area where the animals are supposedly protected--the number of elephants has dropped from 13,800 to 725 in 15 years, decreasing by 95%, he said.

Decline is Precipitous

“The numbers are declining much faster than people thought,” said Rick Weyerhaeuser, director of World Wildlife Fund’s Africa Program. “This is a disaster.”

“For East Africa the data would suggest that the elephant is already an endangered species,” Douglas-Hamilton said. “There is no way the East African elephants could sustain the ivory off-take of the last 10 years over the next 10 years without going extinct.”

The report “is a cause for extreme alarm,” said researcher Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, whose work helped lead to the 1983 discovery that elephants use sounds below the threshold of human hearing to communicate over 2 miles or more. “We’re going to live to see the end of wild elephants in Africa unless there’s a stop to this.”

The census, performed by researchers flying over known elephant areas and counting the pachyderms, surveyed 31 areas in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

In a few protected areas, such as Kenya’s famed Masai Mara Reserve and Amboseli National Park, the elephant population has increased as a result of effective anti-poaching patrols and tourism in recent years.

But the overall numbers show a stark decline. In unprotected areas, the 10-year change shows a 78% drop in the elephant population of East Africa. In protected areas, which include national parks and game reserves, the decline is 51%.

Increasingly, Douglas-Hamilton said, elephant carcasses are littering his study areas. “Drought and human encroachment are not killing the animals,” he said in a telephone interview from Nairobi.

That the ivory trade is responsible, he said, is evidenced by “the number of dead elephants I see (while) flying over Africa and, on all of them, the tusks are missing.”

Patti Loesche, a Douglas-Hamilton colleague, said she has been seeing an average of one wounded elephant each day in the course of her wildlife studies over the past year at Tanzania’s Lake Manyara.

Meeting an elephant on a forest trail “is an incredibly exciting experience that deepens your understanding of the way our ancestors lived,” Estes said. But walking along those same trails today, she added, “you encounter the ghosts of elephants.”

About a quarter of Africa’s estimated 764,000 elephants are believed to be in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and the Sudan. But these are admittedly guesses, based on little documentation.

Although census data is even more scanty for other African nations, Douglas-Hamilton said, the situation is probably the same--or worse--over the rest of Africa, with the exception of a few southern nations like Zimbabwe, where elephant herds are carefully managed and reportedly growing despite a thriving ivory trade.

But in Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic and Zaire, poaching has virtually wiped out the animal already, according to an earlier Douglas-Hamilton article in the journal of the English Fauna Preservation Society, Oryx.

During 1979-82, for example, Sudan exported 1,200 tons of ivory representing the deaths of an estimated 107,000 elephants, or about 80% of the total elephant population in that country, according to Mutasim Bashir Nimir, director of the Sudan Wildlife Research Center in Khartoum.

With sharply rising ivory prices--which have jumped by more than sevenfold since 1978--and the increasingly easy access to firearms, there has been nothing short of a firestorm of poaching, even in national parks.

Since 1971, the value of arms imported to the strife-ridden continent has increased from $500 million to $4.5 billion. And some of those weapons have found their way into poachers’ hands, according to Douglas-Hamilton. He said that some soldiers find poaching an easy way to augment meager salaries and that park guards are often simply not equipped to deal with well-armed poachers.

Tempted by fast money, “it is not at all unusual for park guards to turn into poachers themselves,” Estes said. This is documented by numerous researchers and authors and acknowledged by African officials.

Douglas-Hamilton’s latest census contradicts earlier reports that have suggested that, at least in some parts of Africa, concern over ivory-driven elephant poaching is exaggerated.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, elephants fleeing poachers congregated in some national parks such as Tsavo in Kenya. The concentration of animals damaged trees and shrubs and, for a time, the Kenyan government actually considered culling elephants in these protected areas.

Moreover, studies as recently as in 1982 and 1983 sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have concluded that ivory trade did not pose an immediate crisis for African elephants. Instead, researcher Ian Parker had said, an expanding human population was the major threat.

But Douglas-Hamilton has argued since then that Parker’s thesis was based on incomplete ivory trade records that represented only a tiny percentage of the actual numbers of elephants killed for their tusks.

International trade records show that nearly 300 tons of uncarved elephant tusks were legally exported from African nations in 1986. But a 1987 meeting of officials of the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species concluded that only 26% of the ivory that actually left Africa was exported legally.

This would mean that about three-quarters of the ivory items sold around the world came from illegally slaughtered elephants.

As the biggest tuskers are wiped out, elephant hunters are resorting to killing smaller and younger animals, according to Douglas-Hamilton. He said the average weight of tusks imported by Japan--like the United States, a major consumer of ivory--fell from 16.29 kilograms (35.91 pounds) in 1979 to 9.7 kilograms (21.38 pounds) in 1982.

Some Governmental Controls

The governments of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in recent years have imposed some controls over the ivory trade, but poachers in those countries are continuing to provide most of the world’s African ivory.

The Tanzanian government took over control of the sale of ivory in 1986, allowing export only of ivory obtained with legal permits. Kenya outlawed private ivory trading in 1978, leaving the job to government-sponsored cullers and marketers. And Uganda in 1987 agreed to limit annual ivory exports to 156 tusks.

Some wildlife experts hope that, in time, international trade agreements that restrict ivory sales to scientifically determined, legally enforced quotas will quell poaching.

An ivory quota system was set up by Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species agreement in 1986, which was intended to impose limits on ivory exportation.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Weyerhaeuser said promoting a legal and ecologically sound ivory trade could give African nations a powerful economic incentive to preserve their wildlife resources. He said he hopes that Douglas-Hamilton’s census will provide new incentive to enforce the treaties and adherence to the quota system.

10-YEAR COMPARISON OF AFRICAN ELEPHANTS BY SELECTED AREAS A new census of elephants in East Africa reveals that the elephant population in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda has declined significantly in the last 10 to 15 years. Environmental experts predict the animal will become extinct in those countries by 1998, if poaching practices persist. Attempts to protect elephants from poachers, through export quotas and bans on private sales, has driven up the price of ivory since 1970, from $7.74 per kilo to $100 per kilo.

Gray bars represent 100% of elephant population in 1977, black bars represent percent of population surviving in 1987.

PERCENT CHANGE POPULATIONS 1977 1987 UGANDA -56% 4,190 1,855 1. Queen Elizabeth National Park -42% 1,200 700 (formerly Rubenzwori) 2. Murchison Falls National Park -69% 2,375 725 (formerly Kabalega) 3. Kidepo National Park -30% 615 430

(In 1987, Uganda agreed to limit annual ivory exports to 156 tusks.)

PERCENT CHANGE POPULATIONS 1977 1987 KENYA -67% 59,037 19,672 4. Marsabit National Reserve +70% 529 900 5. Masai Mara National Park +54% 710 1,100 6. Amboseli National Park +51% 450 680 7. Tsavo National Park -70% 19,300

(Kenya banned private ivory sales in 1978. The government sells tusks confiscated from poachers and those harvested from animals that die naturally.)

PERCENT CHANGE POPULATIONS 1977 1987 TANZANIA -53% 184,872 87,088 8. Serengeti National Park -87% 3,008 395 9. Tarangire National Park no change 3,000 10. Ruaha National Park -50% 43,685 21,986 11. Selous Game Reserve -50% 109,000 55,000

(Tanzania banned the private sales and export in 1986. The government sells tusks confiscated from poachers and those harvested from animals that die naturally.) THE RISING PRICE OF IVORY: According to the World Wildlife Fund, the price of ivory has increased more than 12-fold since 1970. The group, a leader in the fight against the illegal ivory trade, assembles price figures from a variety of legal and black-market sources.

Price per kilo 1970: $7.44 1978: $74.42 1987: $100