The Hunt for the Golden Mole (19 page)

Every so often the investigators get lucky. They had a notable run in the summer of 2006 when they recovered 1,094 tusks at Kaohsiung in Taiwan, 390 tusks and 121 pieces of cut ivory at Hong Kong, and 608 pieces of raw ivory, equivalent to 260 tusks, at Osaka. The raw tusks alone represented 872 elephants. DNA showed that all were from East Africa, and that the Taiwanese haul was from Tanzania. To say that the criminal business was booming is to understate the case by an order of magnitude. CITES' official monitoring service, the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), reported in 2009 that trafficking had doubled in a year. Hauls included 6.2 tonnes from Hai Phong, Vietnam, in March 2009; 3.5 tonnes from the Philippines in May 2010; 2 tonnes at Bangkok international airport in August the same year, and the 1,768 kilos recovered
in Operation Costa. In November, poachers extirpated the entire elephant herd in Sierra Leone's Outamba-Kilimi National Park.

I am writing this on 14 February 2012. To check the trend, I look up the figures for January. Early in the month two Chinese men in South Africa were caught with ‘several elephant tusks and ivory goods'. On the 6th, customs in Port Klang, Malaysia, seized 494 kilograms of raw tusks, bubble-wrapped and hidden among used tyres and flooring materials in a container shipped from Cape Town. On the 14th, the UK Border Agency found ten carved ivory ornaments and a hippo's foot in the luggage of a woman arriving from Zambia. On the 26th in Polokwane, South Africa, police arrested a man in possession of four tusks, three rhino horns and firearms. There were reports of widespread poaching in Zimbabwe, where thirty elephants had been found dead in Mana Pools National Park. Worldwide, more than a hundred elephants were being killed every day.

All businesses involve an element of risk, usually based on calculations of supply and demand. For criminal enterprises that can switch commodities – drugs, firearms, ivory, people – with a click of the fingers, the orthodoxies of market economics are not an issue. Profit is balanced against the risk of jail, not the risk of bankruptcy. And this is what makes ivory so attractive. Smuggling tusks instead of drugs earns similar profits for a fraction of the risk. In April 2000, a Japanese government official was caught smuggling 492.3 kilograms of ivory – at least fifty-five elephants' worth – into Osaka. He was fined 300,000 yen, equivalent at the time to 2,700 dollars, or less than 2 per cent of the value of the ivory. By contrast, in the same city two years later a British man was jailed for fourteen years for smuggling 10 pounds of ecstasy and cocaine.

It was late in 2008 that CITES took what it insisted was a rational decision, rooted in good intentions and grounded in
logic. If it couldn't beat the criminals, it reasoned, then it would join them. It would set up in competition and, by so doing, bring the ivory market down. Four southern African countries – Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – would be allowed to auction their stockpiles. By flooding the market with 108 tonnes of ‘legal' ivory, they would put the poachers out of business. The decision was met with disbelief. Richard Leakey, the distinguished conservationist and former director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, warned CITES that selling to the highest bidders would drive the price up, not down, and poaching would become even more profitable.

Disbelief turned to consternation when CITES chose as its trading partners the very countries, China and Japan, that sustained the illegal markets. Leakey pointed out that Chinese traffickers had been convicted of smuggling ivory from twenty-two of the thirty-seven African countries that still had elephants. The inevitable result of Chinese involvement, he predicted, would be to open up the illegal markets. In England Will Travers, chief executive of the Born Free Foundation, wrote to the then environment minister Joan Ruddock, urging her to oppose the sale. She refused. ‘It is your opinion that this sale will fuel illegal poaching;' she wrote back, ‘it is ours that it will not.' Selling to China didn't bother her either. ‘The EU delegation was satisfied that China had met the criteria which meant establishing robust controls to ensure that only legal ivory is imported . . .'

For a long time afterwards the British government's Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) refused to accept that the sale had backfired. ‘The evidence which would show whether or not that decision was the right one isn't available yet,' it said in December 2009, and referred me back to the Elephant Trade Information System. In fact, I already had a statement from ETIS which it had published a month earlier.
While it agreed that the effects of the sale were not ‘clear cut', it acknowledged that a ‘remarkable surge' in ivory seizures had suggested ‘increased involvement of organised crime syndicates'. It also found that illegal ivory typically ‘follow(s) a path to destinations where law enforcement is weak and markets function with little regulatory impediment'. In case anyone doubted who it had in mind, it added: ‘China . . . faces a persistent illegal trade challenge from Chinese nationals now based in Africa. Ongoing evidence highlights widespread involvement of overseas Chinese in the illicit procurement of ivory, a problem that needs to be addressed through an aggressive outreach and awareness initiative directed at Chinese communities living abroad.'

In the real world of blood and bullets, there is little patience with the equivocators. In late 2009, Patrick Omondi, head of conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, checked off the figures for me. ‘In 2007 Kenya lost forty-seven elephants. In 2008 it was 145. This year [2009] it is 220, the worst since 1989.' Shortly before Operation Costa, more than half a tonne of ivory was intercepted at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta airport. Destination: China.

‘The legal sales have led to illegal killing across the continent,' he said. ‘We are doing all we can, but we have seen an increase in demand so high that it puts a lot of pressure on our law enforcement. The logic behind the sale – that it would satisfy demand in China and Japan – was not true.' Nothing much has changed. In July 2011, Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, ceremoniously set fire to five tonnes of contraband ivory, 600 elephants' worth, with a black market value of sixteen million US dollars, hoping to convince the syndicates that they couldn't win, and to encourage other countries to follow his example. Hope and experience, however, are on different trajectories. Only a few
days earlier, poachers in the north of the country had been caught with forty-one tusks. In January 2012, another Kenyan game ranger was shot and killed. And so it goes on.

The one good sign is the return of something nearer sanity in the European official mind. The international community at last has ceased to believe that it can stop the ivory trade by making it legal. For CITES, the problem has always been more difficult than it sounds. Its job as a trade organisation is not to ban sales of endangered species but only to ensure that the trade is sustainable – an economic proposition, not an ethical one. What this means in effect is that trade goes on until someone can prove that it shouldn't. The issue of ivory finally came to a head at a meeting in Qatar in March 2010, when two important ‘range states', Zambia and Tanzania, argued that their elephants should be downgraded from CITES Appendix I, which bans all international trade, to Appendix II, which allows it ‘subject to strict regulation'.

This is classic doublespeak. Law enforcement in Africa is stretched beyond breaking point. In its wide-open spaces the keenest eyes belong to vultures and strictness is a concept observed only by the tracking of the sun. By 2010, poaching in Zambia and Tanzania was out of control. According to a park official quoted by the Tanzanian newspaper
ThisDay
, the country's Selous Game Reserve was losing fifty elephants a month. The same official made an accusation which, if true, would be a benchmark in the history of cynicism. ‘Sometimes,' he said, ‘authorities torch the carcasses of elephants that have been killed by poachers to conceal the truth about the extent of the problem.' There was no way of confirming this, but Zambian and Tanzanian ambitions were nothing if not transparent. They wanted to sell their stockpiles – more than 111,000 kilos of ivory – presumably into the very same channels that were used by the poachers. All the same
old arguments were rolled out. It would flatten the market. The money would be invested in conservation. The good guys would win, the bad guys would lose, and hippos would dance the polka.

The Kenyans, who had suffered a 400 per cent increase in poaching since 2007, were outraged by their neighbours' attempt to exploit a ‘malicious loophole'. The whole idea of national ‘ownership' was false. Elephants flow as easily across boundaries as air and water do. Patrick Omondi told me about seven elephants killed near the Kenya–Tanzania border. ‘Five were on the Tanzanian side, and two on ours,' he said. ‘It is difficult to say, this is a Kenyan elephant, or this is a Tanzanian elephant.' The governments of the DRC, Mali, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, all members of the twenty-three-strong African Elephant Coalition, joined Kenya in opposing the renewal of trade. With a horribly apt sense of timing, within a few weeks of Tanzania and Zambia submitting their applications, the government of Sierra Leone announced that its last few elephants had all been killed.

One of the lucky few. This young elephant, photographed at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, has better protection than most

And where stood the UK? How would it use its influence at CITES? I asked the question, and back came the answer. The European Union as a whole, said Defra, had yet to agree a position. It was waiting for ‘scientific evidence'. By whom would that evidence be supplied? Who else but those best placed to provide it. The national governments of Zambia and Tanzania.

For the elephant, for Africa, it was a season of crisis. The cost of a liberalised ivory trade would have been far worse than just the demise of the world's biggest land animal. Tourism is the lodestone of the Kenyan economy. Its imports must be paid for in hard currency, not in Kenyan shillings, and it is tourism that turns the vital dollars and pounds. The tourist trade collapsed during the previous poaching surge in the 1970s and '80s, and it would have collapsed again if animals disappeared or if the parks became too dangerous.

The animals contribute in other ways too. When people in Nairobi turn on their taps, it is the elephants they must thank for their water. Pools, reservoirs and aquifers are fed by water trickling from forests that absorb and release moisture like sponges. Healthy forests need diversity, and diversity needs sunlight. It is the elephants pushing down trees that open the canopy and prevent the development of monocultures vulnerable to pests, diseases and fires, and much less efficient as sponges. Some plants won't even germinate unless their seeds have passed through an elephant's gut.

The tangled complexities of politics, economics and ecology reflected the eternal conflicts. Today versus tomorrow, greed
versus conservation, death versus life. There was, too, a single irreducible truth. One way or another, elephant poaching would cease. Only CITES and its member states could determine whether this would be because they had beaten crime, or because there were no animals left to shoot. It's a question that hangs over Africa like a witch doctor's curse. The enemy is formidable, the future unknowable, but at least the enemy no longer includes Britain and its European partners. After months of prevarication, the then environment secretary Hilary Benn announced that the UK would, after all, oppose the ivory trade. Sense was seen; justice done. At the CITES conference in Doha, the would-be ivory traders of Zambia and Tanzania were overwhelmingly outvoted.

For the poachers, however, it was a political abstraction that left them untouched. Whatever the law said, it was business as usual. Within hours of the debate at Doha, twenty-four uncut tusks were intercepted by the Spanish Guardia Civil near Barcelona. Four weeks later, Thai authorities seized 296 tusks at Bangkok international airport. With the hideous irony we have come to expect, they had been shipped from the host nation of the CITES conference, Qatar itself. In May, Interpol mounted another series of raids across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, seizing 400 kilograms of ivory and rhino horn, closing down a factory and making forty-one arrests. In the same month, still only a few weeks after Doha, forty-eight tusks were intercepted on a main road near Nairobi, and a tonne of ivory was uncovered in a load of African snails at Hai Phong in Vietnam. In October, Cameroonian authorities raided two hunting camps and found half a tonne of elephant meat, twelve tusks and assorted weaponry. In November, 384 tusks were seized at Hong Kong, having traced a circuitous route via Malaysia from Tanzania. In December,
more than 100 kilograms of ivory was seized and sixteen dealers arrested in Gabon, and two Singaporeans caught with 92 kilograms at Jomo Kenyatta airport. And so it has proceeded ever since. Each arrest, each seizure, is a small victory for the enforcement agencies. But each scratch of the surface confirms the lethal vigour of an exponentially bigger trade that operates with little interference from the law. For every tusk intercepted, ten escape the net.