– ‘Needs long-term commitment’ –
TEPS director Alfred Kikoti said he wanted the military to resume its role battling poachers.
“They have to stay in there, protecting our elephants,” he said. “They can’t just be in there for one operation and then pull out. It needs to be a longer term commitment.”
Poaching has risen sharply in Africa in recent years, with gangs targeting rhinos and massacring whole herds of elephants for their ivory.
Organised gangs with insider knowledge and armed with automatic weapons and specialised equipment such as night vision goggles, use chainsaws to carve out the rhino horn or remove elephant tusks.
The growing trend is threatening Tanzania’s tourism sector, a key foreign currency earner for the country.
The industry, nine tenths of which revolves around wildlife, accounts for 17 percent of Tanzania’s gross domestic product and employs over 300,000 people, according to official statistics.
Millions of dollars of elephant tusks and rhino horns are smuggled out of East Africa each year, according to the United Nations, with demand fuelled by an increasingly affluent Chinese middle class.
Tanzania’s vast Selous-Mikumi region was once home to one of the largest elephant populations in the world, with around 70,000 animals living there in 2006, Bilal said.
Last year, that had plummeted to only 13,000 elephants.
The sale of ivory stockpiles – from tusks seized from poachers or recovered from animals that have died naturally – to raise funds for conservation created fierce debate at the conference.
International trade in ivory has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) since 1989.
Tanzania’s current stock of 120 tonnes of ivory could – if sold at black market prices – raise over 60 million dollars (43 million euros), but conservationists argued it would only encourage more killings.
“A legal ivory market only stimulates an illegal ivory market,” said Trevor Jones, director of the Southern Tanzania Elephant Project.
“Moreover, an existing stockpile stimulates poaching, because it gives poachers hope that there may one day be a legal market, giving criminals a chance to launder their ivory.”
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