How DNA Testing Could Bring Down Ivory Trade's Biggest Criminals

[Judi Lynn]

Genetic testing exposes three major cartels illegally trafficking ivory out of several African countries

By Katherine J. Wu
smithsonian.com
September 19, 2018

Behind every piece of ivory is the death of an elephant. Up to 40,000 African elephant lives are lost to poaching each year, with some regions reporting a decline of over 60 percent in their elephant populations in a single decade. Today, in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, scientists used genetic testing to implicate three of the largest export cartels trafficking tusks out of Africa during the peak of ivory trade between 2011 and 2014.

Poaching tends to be concentrated in regional hotspots on the African continent. The study’s lead author Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, says conservationists have been able to pinpoint a small handful of areas responsible for what he calls the “lion’s share” of ivory coming out of Africa in the last decade. But setting their sites on these targets isn’t enough. Ivory is almost always shipped out of a different country than the one in which it’s been poached, and there’s no trail of breadcrumbs leading backwards from the ports of exit.

What’s more, individual poachers and traffickers tend to be elusive. They wield a home-field advantage in the regions in which they hunt, and are seldom prosecuted even when apprehended. Even convictions, when they happen, don’t always stick. Just last month, a Kenyan court overturned a ruling that had previously sentenced high-profile ivory trafficker Feisal Mohamed Ali to 20 years in prison. The original sentencing, delivered only two years prior, had tied Ali to a cache of $4.2 million worth of ivory in a Mombasa warehouse, an isolated event representing only a fraction of his long-standing reputation as one of the world’s most infamous “ivory kingpins.”

“Wildlife is... very valuable, and yet so few wildlife cases are prosecuted because they are not a very high priority for law enforcement,” explained Wasser in an American Association for the Advancement of Science press conference on Tuesday.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-dna-testing-could-bring-down-ivory-trades-biggest-criminals-180970332/#1JMd6Oz8r0ZESW07.99