Today is the day. Kenya is burning seized tusks and finished ivory goods representing more than 6,000 dead elephants to highlight the scourge of illegal poaching that is driving the mammal to extinction on the African continent.
105 metric tons of confiscated ivory will be torched at Nairobi national park at noon and will be attended by Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, heads of state including Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, high-ranking United Nations and US officials, and charities. A wide network of conservation groups around the world have sent messages applauding the work.
The undertaking highlights both a renewed push by African nations to end illegal poaching and the challenges faced by conservationists on a continent where the pressure to address urgent human needs often collides with efforts to preserve wildlife habitats.
From 1.2 million in the 1970s, the number of elephants roaming Africa has plunged to about 400,000. Conservation groups estimate elephants are being killed at a pace—-about 30,000 a year—that exceeds the population’s annual birthrate.
But while a number of African leaders and conservation heavyweights are set to attend today’s burn, Botswana, which is home to the world’s largest elephant herd, says the measure undermines efforts to persuade local communities that ivory is more valuable on live elephants than dead ones.
“For us, burning an elephant’s tusks is like putting the final nail in the coffin of a once magnificent animal,” Botswana’s Environment Minister Tshekedi Khama wrote in a recent piece in Britain’s Independent newspaper. Rather than burning ivory, Botswana has used some of its recovered ivory in public art projects that memorialize the dead elephants.
“It’s extremely unwise to get rid of your stocks. It’s a big bargaining chip in the future,” said Mike Norton-Griffiths, an independent consultant on conservation economics in Kenya. The future of elephant conservation, he said, may rest not in destroying tusks and other ivory products but in a tightly regulated, legal market of the product.
“I simply cannot see any way in which they can completely close down the ivory trade,” he said.
But that is exactly the goal of an international movement working to reduce demand in Asia—the main market for ivory—and to stop massive poaching across the African continent. In what could be a turning point for the effort, African leaders are heading up some of the newest initiatives.
Kenya has had some success with both reducing poaching in recent years and encouraging networks of private conservancies that work with local communities to find ways to accommodate both livestock and elephant herds.
Also this week, the 27 countries that have signed onto a group called the African Elephant Coalition pressed the international consortium that monitors illegal wildlife trade to commit to listing elephants at the highest threat level, to closing all domestic markets and to destroying ivory stockpiles.
A spokesman for the Kenyan Wildlife Service said that the countries now banding together against poaching and the ivory trade are aware of how difficult a task is in front of them, no pan intended.
“Our elephants have never come under the sort of crisis that we are seeing now emerging,” said spokesman Paul Udoto. He said the ivory burn is an important symbolic move for a country that has struggled both with poaching and its role as a transit point for ivory-selling gangs. “It’s deep from our feeling that the time has come for the world to stand for our wildlife.”
Last Friday, President Kenyatta said Kenya would seek a “total ban on the trade in elephant ivory” at an international wildlife trade meeting in South Africa this September. “The future of the African elephant and rhino is far from secure so long as demand for their products continues to exist,” he said.
