3 Months Before Next CITES Convention, Fight Brewing Over Ivory Sales From Some African Nations

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Three months from a major international conference on endangered species, African countries are divided over whether a fresh round of ivory sales should be allowed. With black market sales on the rise again, some nations that consider their elephant populations to be out of danger are arguing stocks of the precious ivory should be sold legally.

Tanzania and Zambia, for example, have asked the CITES (Convention on International Trade in International Species) conference to be held from March 13 to 25 in Doha to authorise them to sell 90 and 22 tonnes of ivory respectively. This request for an exemption to the 1989 ban on ivory sales, a measure destined to protect the African elephant and rhino, has rekindled a war between countries with varying animal population levels.

If elephants used to roam the African continent in their millions, today they number somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000. More than half are found in southern Africa with just a few thousand, or sometimes a few hundred, in most western, central and eastern African countries. In some cases the animals have disappeared all together, for example in Burundi, Gambia, Mauritania or Sierra Leone.

"We don't want to see elephants survive just in one corner of Africa, just in southern Africa," said Patrick Omondi who will head the Kenyan delegation to the Doha talks. The last CITES conference in the Hague in June 2007 led to confrontations between African countries but they eventually reached a compromise prolonging the moratorium on ivory sales by nine years but allowing Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Botswana to make a one-off sale of 108 tonnes to buyers in China and Japan.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/African_countries_set_for_new_fight_over_ivory_sales_999.html