Wildlife War

Africa is centre of a ‘wildlife war’ that the world is losing.
A year on since 46 countries signed up to the ‘London declaration’ to eradicate the trade in horn and ivory, rhinos and elephants are still being pushed closer to extinction.

The northern white rhino is heading the way of the dinosaurs. With only five left on Earth – three in Kenya, one in America, and one in the Czech Republic – extinction is now inevitable. It survived for millions of years, but could not survive mankind.

This is just one subspecies, but soon the planet’s remaining 28,500 rhinos could be under threat from the illegal wildlife trade. Worth up to £12bn a year, it has joined drugs, arms and human trafficking as one of the world’s biggest crime rackets. Ground zero in this “wildlife war” is Africa, and the conservationists are losing as animals are slaughtered on an industrial scale to meet demand for horn and ivory in newly affluent Asian countries.

At least 220 chimpanzees, 106 orang-utans, 33 bonobos and 15 gorillas have been lost from the wild over the past 14 months, according to estimates by the Great Apes Survival Partnership. Elephants also remain under siege – at least 20,000 were poached annually from 2011 to 2013, according to the UN – although countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have fought back with some measure of success over the past year.

Arguably the biggest setback since the London conference has been the failure to arrest, prosecute and convict all but a handful of players in the transnational wildlife mafia. Dr Patrick Bergin, chief executive of the African Wildlife Foundation, said he had attended one recent meeting where there was talk of progress, but “the glaring silence in the room was the lack of successful prosecutions”.

He continued: “We don’t see people going to jail. It’s easy to say we’re putting more dogs at airports or doing more training, but the international community is only going to get serious about this when we see people going to jail. We need to see a preponderance of prosecutions and sentences handed down that sends a message to the traffickers that it’s not worth the risk.”

The concern is shared by Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network. Tom Milliken, its rhino programme coordinator, said: “In all of this, the judiciary in many countries is lagging behind the times. A white South African who was reportedly a major player in the trade and his cohorts were arrested, but got out on bail. Organised crime can have the best legal guns in the country and those involved in rhino crime are heavily lawyered up.”

The scale of impunity was vividly illustrated when Bartholomäus Grill, a German journalist with Der Spiegel, went to Mozambique to investigate the supply chain from South Africa through middlemen to the horns’ ultimate buyers in Vietnam, where they fetch up to $65,000 a kilo – more valuable than gold. When he visited the home of a notorious poaching kingpin, Grill was taken hostage by an angry mob and threatened with death. Far from offering help, the local police appeared to be under the kingpin’s thumb.

Politicians in Tanzania say they are aware of the need to tackle poverty. January Makamba, a minister and potential presidential candidate this year, said: “The villages that surround these sanctuaries have to somehow be taken care of in a manner that people do not feel that ‘we have to help poachers to poach so we can make a living’.

Makamba added: “The issues of poaching and logging are issues of governance and poverty. Corruption is the centre of it. You deal with corruption, you are halfway to dealing with the problem of poaching.”