KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa--South Africa's Kruger National Park is littered in places with the trunks of trees uprooted and stripped of bark by a surging population of elephants, a frequent sight in the reserve.
Africa's elephants are still threatened by poachers seeking to kill them for their ivory tusks but in several southern states populations have rebounded, helped by conservation policies and the remote locations where many of the herds live. The numbers are now so big that some countries say the world's largest land mammal is causing too much damage to crops, threatening the livelihoods of poor subsistence farmers and the populations of other species including birds, bats and woody plants in forests uprooted by elephants.
Zimbabwe and Namibia have asked for a global ban on ivory trade to be lifted so that they can use the proceeds of national stockpiles of tusks to fund conservation and support communities living near elephants. "Elephants are regarded as a liability and economic cost to rural communities, who suffer crop losses, other damages and lose human lives," Namibia's proposal says. Its population has increased to 20,000 from 7,500 the past two decades.
The request to sell stockpiles, collected through seizures of contraband, natural mortality in the wild and the shooting of problem animals, will be considered at a meeting of the U.N.'s Conference on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Johannesburg from September 24 to October 5.
The ban on trade in ivory products was imposed in 1989 in response to a wave of poaching, though domestic trade has remained legal in a number of countries including China. The United States in July imposed a near-total ban on domestic ivory sales within its borders.
Opponents are concerned that if CITES allows ivory to be traded, even from stockpiles and as a one-off, it would send a signal that it is socially acceptable, which could spur demand and further poaching. Ivory is particularly coveted in Asia where it is used for carving and jewelry. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were given permission to sell stockpiles to Japan in 1999 and were joined by South Africa in 2008 in a sale to China and Japan.
A June 2016 study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that the 2008 sale likely led to an increase in elephant poaching. It noted an estimated 71 percent increase in ivory smuggling out of Africa "while corresponding patterns are absent from natural mortality and alternative explanatory variables. These data suggest the widely documented recent increase in elephant poaching likely originated with the legal sale."
Poaching has skyrocketed in the past decade in much of the continent to feed the illicit market, lending a new sense of urgency to campaigns to completely close the trade for good.
