Ivory Stash Driving Debate

It takes three people to unlock the strongroom here at the headquarters of the South African National Parks.

One person turns the main key. Another handles the backup lock. And the third keeps watch over the other two.

When the heavy door swings open, the safeguards become understandable. Stretching the width of a three-car garage, the concrete vault is stacked with elephant tusks, more than 33 tons of ivory in all.

The storeroom filled steadily over a decade while a worldwide ban on the sale of ivory took hold. Now a South African proposal to sell most of the stockpile, believed to be worth $5 million, has embroiled governments across the continent, animal rights activists around the world and poor communities here adjoining Kruger National Park in a heated debate about how best to protect Africa’s signature pachyderm.

The elephant population in Africa, estimated at 620,000 last year, has fallen from 1.2 million less than 20 years ago. Although the decline appears to have been checked, there is deep disagreement about the long-term prognosis and what role the trade in ivory--which has been banned internationally since 1989 except for an experimental sale last year--should play in managing a recovery.

The South Africans say regulated sales of ivory acquired through natural elephant deaths and other legal means would provide badly needed funds for elephant conservation and reward countries that have curbed the devastating poaching of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the money from the proposed South African sale, for example, would be used to run a new elephant management program at Kruger, which envisions the elephant population within its boundaries doubling over the next 20 years. Other revenue would go to enlarging an elephant park in the country’s Eastern Cape province.

“No serious management agency in Africa is saying the species is going extinct,” said Anthony Hall-Martin, director of conservation development for South African national parks. “We will not be part of a process that drives elephants to extinction. We think this is an opportunity to drive the numbers up.”

But wildlife officials elsewhere, particularly those in Kenya, warn that a resumption in ivory sales anywhere in Africa is an invitation to black-market profiteers and places elephants everywhere in extreme jeopardy. They say last year’s trial sale by Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe led to an increase in elephant deaths by poaching, though one international investigation last week found no direct link.

The so-called range states of East Africa, where wildlife enforcement is difficult because elephants are free to roam vast stretches of plains, fear they will be the easiest targets. Some Asian countries, such as India, also worry that ivory sales in Africa will have a domino effect around the world and further threaten the endangered Asian elephant population, which numbers fewer than 50,000.

“One thing we know is that once the ivory that is buried around the country is exhausted and put into the illegal market, poachers will begin to go straight for the live elephants,” said Nehemiah Rotich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service. “There’s no question about that.”

Last year, Kenyan authorities confiscated about 2 tons of ivory from illegal traffickers, compared with just more than 3 tons for the previous nine years combined. The biggest bust in 1999 was at the Nairobi airport, where ivory weighing 1,500 pounds was packed in boxes belonging to a North Korean diplomat who admitted he intended to sell it in China. In a separate incident, a 400-pound consignment was intercepted from another North Korean, according to Kenyan officials.

“At the end of the day, we are also struggling for our own livelihood,” Rotich said. “Kenya’s tourism is largely based on wildlife viewing. No tourist would enjoy seeing carcasses in the park, as they used to see in the ‘80s and ‘70s.”

So controversial is the proposed South African sale that park officials here only opened the Kruger strongroom to The Times under strict conditions: No photographs. No detailed description of the building or its location. No more than five minutes inside.

Public Burning of 2,000 Tusks in ’89

While eager to make a case for unloading the cache, the South Africans say they are keenly aware of the almost mystical power the thousands of amputated tusks can hold over worldwide public opinion. One of the seminal moments in the successful movement to ban ivory sales came in 1989, when Kenyan authorities held an emotion-charged public burning of 2,000 elephant tusks.

Later that year, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, voted to ban the trade of ivory and other elephant products in a last-ditch effort to stem rampant poaching across much of the continent. Even then, however, the southern Africans argued that their elephant populations should be treated separately because they were not threatened.

“This place was never meant to stockpile 11 years of ivory, so it is overcrowded,” said Manie Coetzee, head of protection services, apologizing for the tangle of tusks piled from floor to ceiling. “We are hoping to clean up the strongroom by selling most of the tusks and destroying the junk.”

South Africa wants to sell at least 30 tons of the ivory to Japan. Its three southern African neighbors last year traded portions of their ivory stockpiles under a one-time experiment approved by CITES.

In all, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe sold 65 tons of ivory to Japan, where there is a centuries-old tradition of ivory carving that includes crafting hanko, personalized signature seals used on official Japanese documents. The sale was approved in 1997 over the objections of the United States and many other CITES members during a meeting in Zimbabwe that followed heavy lobbying by the southern Africans.

When CITES delegates convene again Monday in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, the South Africans will press for a similar trial sale for themselves.

A series of proposals from southern Africa would allow Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe to sell an additional 26 tons a year of their combined stocks, while expanding the experiment to include a maximum of 33 tons from South Africa. The proposals also would allow the countries to sell elephant hides for commercial purposes and to trade live elephants to recognized conservation authorities--far less contentious issues than the ivory sales.

“It is going to be very heated in Nairobi,” said Marcus Burgener of the Britain-based Trade Record Analysis of Fauna and Flora in Commerce, or TRAFFIC, a wildlife monitoring program that works closely with the CITES secretariat. “I don’t think anyone can say at this stage which way the decision will go.”

The debate in 1997 also was wild and furious, but many opponents of last year’s sale found some comfort in its cautious and limited reach. This year’s proposals have galvanized the opposition because they risk turning the exception on ivory sales into the rule.

Jason Bell, South Africa’s campaigns coordinator for the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, said South Africa’s request, in particular, is viewed with suspicion. Although the South Africans are asking to sell only old ivory, animal rights groups are certain it is the first step in an effort to sell tusks from freshly killed elephants.

The new Kruger elephant management plan, for example, would allow a dramatic increase in the elephant population, but it would also reintroduce culling for the first time in years. Park officials are vague about how many animals would have to be killed, but projections show that many hundreds would ultimately need to be eliminated from the park through translocation, contraception or culling. Additionally, South African police maintain various ivory stockpiles, separate from the Kruger collection, consisting mainly of tusks confiscated from smugglers. About 60 tons of illegal ivory have been seized since 1990.

“Their ivory proposal now is about opening up a little door to get into a very big room,” Bell said. “If they get away with it this time around, the danger is they will be back asking for more.”

The Kenyans also are suspicious. They say it is too early to evaluate last year’s trial sale because the monitoring systems required by CITES as a condition of the deal are only now up and running. TRAFFIC argues that any further sales should wait until more monitoring data are available.

The South Africans and their neighbors contend that the 1989 prohibition on the ivory trade has had little effect on the illegal commerce but has deprived countries of an important source of conservation revenue. Officially, African countries have a combined ivory stockpile of at least 176 tons, representing about 40,000 tusks and pieces, according to reports from 14 countries filed with CITES. TRAFFIC suspects that the actual amount exceeds 660 tons.

Poaching remains a problem in countries that have lax law enforcement, the southern Africans argue, but has been almost wiped out in those nations where anti-poaching efforts are a top priority. Last year, only two of 9,152 elephants at Kruger were lost to poachers, according to park officials, who said more elephants in South Africa are killed by other elephants than by humans.

Police Supt. Pieter Lategan, who oversees South Africa’s endangered-species protection unit, says troubled countries should seek help in policing their game reserves rather than punish their more successful neighbors by blocking legitimate ivory sales. Lategan said most of the illegal ivory seized in South Africa has been traced to thefts from government stocks elsewhere in Africa.

“Poaching is always going to exist,” Lategan said. “You can buy a car cheap in South Africa, but it is still cheaper to steal one. The same holds true for ivory. The legal market and the illegal market have nothing to do with each other.”

Elephants in South More Than Double

In South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, elephant populations are flourishing and local communities, long at odds with the ravenous and highly destructive creatures, have come to accept that they are worth more alive than dead. Since 1981, the number of elephants in the four southern countries has more than doubled, to 198,000, while the trend across the rest of the continent has been the opposite.

Under the southern African proposals, some of the money from ivory sales would be pumped back into conservation and community development, giving the mostly poor people living near nature reserves and national parks an even greater stake in supporting the elephants. In Zimbabwe, about $575,000 from last year’s sale has been returned to the communities where the elephants originated.

Additionally, proponents say that limiting the sale to ivory from elephants killed for control purposes or those that died naturally assures that there would be no profiting from poaching, not even by the governments that confiscate and stockpile the illegal tusks. Each of the thousands of tusks in the storeroom here is stamped with an identity number, which is linked to a computer database that provides the origin and the circumstances of the elephant’s death.

“For a long time, there was a very hostile arrangement between the parks and the surrounding communities,” said Elizabeth Mhlongo, a South African official who develops programs for villages to share in the economic benefits of national parks. “Now, at forums in the communities, people express appreciation for the parks. They are aware that the elephant in particular brings tourists and job opportunities.”

Last year, in a first for South Africa, a community near Kruger won a landownership court battle with the park but opted not to reclaim its property. Instead, the Makuleke people negotiated a contract with Kruger that allows them to share in the park’s economic success. Mhlongo says ivory sales would only make such cooperation more appealing by providing more money for park development.

The South African argument has won the influential backing of the World Wide Fund for Nature, known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States. Rob Little, head of the group’s South African office, said the killing of elephants for ivory is a small component of elephant deaths in Africa. A more serious threat, he said, is posed by “human existence,” ranging from poaching for food in war-torn countries such as Angola and Congo to clashes between farmers and marauding elephant herds.

Even in Kenya, statistics show that slightly more elephants have been killed since 1992 for so-called control purposes than by criminals. Data provided to CITES by the Kenya Wildlife Service show that 428 elephants were killed by the authorities, versus 413 by poachers.

Little said many poor African countries are becoming increasingly dependent on donations from animal rights groups to run their wildlife programs. The generosity comes with strings attached, he said, which rules out a purely scientific approach to elephant questions.

“Countries such as Kenya have taken an emotive rather than a sound scientific route,” Little said. “We support the South African proposal because it is never too early to reward sound management of any wildlife resource.”

Yet emotion remains everywhere in the elephant debate, sometimes in the least expected places. Delegates next week in Nairobi are just as likely to see tears at work as science.

Coetzee, the Kruger security official with a key to the strongroom here, for many years operated the park’s animal processing plant. The facility, now closed, stripped elephants of their hides for leather products, canned the meat, preserved their feet for furniture and even packaged their tails. Some of the unsold goods fill an entire storeroom here.

The blunt-speaking Coetzee boasts that nothing was wasted aside from the intestines and blood. But get him talking about living elephants, and he is almost as smitten as the most radical animal activist.

Some years back, he helped identify seven of the park’s biggest and most imposing elephant bulls, which became affectionately known as Kruger’s Magnificent Seven. He says he would never agree to sell tusks from those bulls, all of whom have since died. They belong in a museum, he says.

Coetzee also says he has seen elephants laugh and cry and even blush in embarrassment.

“I grew up in this park as a kid since 1953,” he said. “I believe I can just about communicate with elephants.”

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Elephant Populations in Africa

Estimates by wildlife officials place the elephant population in Africa at 620,000. A 1998 head count by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), however, found fewer than 500,000. Based on rough estimates, the nations with large elephant populations include:

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Source: African Elephant Database, published by Species Survival Commission of the IUCN, 1999

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Times staff writer Ann M. Simmons in Nairobi contributed to this report.