Not much sympathy for Namibia’s ivory plan

Namibia does not have much hope for a positive outcome at the upcoming CITES conference in South Africa after it was “flagrantly ignored and disregarded” at the recent IUCN summit.
The minister of environment and tourism, Pohamba Shifeta, last week shed more light on what happened at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Wildlife Congress, where Namibia was involved in a heated debate over its proposal to resume trade in ivory.
Shifeta said the outcome of the IUCN Congress was “disappointing” and pointed towards a similar outcome at the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (CoP17) that is starting on 24 September.
Shifeta said if proposals are passed at CITES that are against Namibia’s constitution, they would invoke Article 15 which means the country would not be bound by the convention. “This means that when a proposal is passed we can either accept or abstain.”
Commenting on what happened at the IUCN held in Hawaii during the first week of September, Shifeta said the congress has around 900 members and more than 700 attended the congress, including 560 non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Around 90 motions needed to be decided on by voting.
He said two-thirds of the IUCN is made up of NGOs which do not take the practical situation on the ground into account. “There is a dominance of NGOs,” Shifeta said.
According to him, apart from a number of constructive discussions on a wide range of important subjects related to conservation and development and protection of the environment with active participation by the Namibian team, a disappointing development was the motion on domestic ivory markets that dominated much of the congress.
According to the minister, this motion was proposed by a consortium of NGOs and African governments where Ethiopia and Gabon were the most vocal. Other strong supporters were the USA and France as well the majority of the NGOs.
According to Shifeta, the motion was contrary to Namibia’s conservation policies and a position shared by South Africa, Japan, some member states and some NGOs.
Shifeta said the vote for or against the motion was not submitted to electronic voting before the congress started as in other cases but was referred to a contact group.
This contact group is made up of the majority of participants that supported the motion and a lesser number opposing it. The objective of the contact group was to develop a compromise in the spirit of the IUCN.
“The contact group was a fiasco; it did not accept any amendment to the motion except a more stringent proposal from France,” said Shifeta.
According to him, the representatives from Namibia and South Africa left the contact group when all their proposals were refused and afterwards submitted a complaint to the chairperson of the motions committee which had set up the contact group. Japan submitted a similar complaint.
Shifeta said based on these complaints, a second meeting of the contact group was held, but exactly the same happened and no amendments to the motion were supported.
The disgruntled member countries were advised to submit amendments to the motion committee directly. These were subjected to a vote on each paragraph, but they were defeated.
The original motion was adopted and afterwards a joint declaration was issued by Namibia and South Africa stating that the IUCN is being used by some organisations to advance their own agendas. It further says the resolution impacts on the rights of the countries to use their own resources and stated that the resolution will not be implemented by the governments.
He said that although Namibia is not currently participating in any domestic trade in ivory, all the necessary regulations are in place for such trade.
He pointed out that Namibia has piles of ivory that it wants to dispose of and will therefore put in the proper mechanisms to eliminate illegal products.
Shifeta also said that Namibia believes that ivory markets can be regulated if there is sufficient political will rather than to just close them.
“There is no justification for a blanket closing of all markets; instead a differentiation is needed in well regulated markets such as in Japan and others that can for whatever reason not regulate sufficiently.”
Shifeta yesterday said that they will closely monitor the situation at IUCN and consider whether Namibia will withdraw from the international body.
“If need be, we will end our membership.”
He added that Namibia has submitted a number of proposals to CITES including a proposal to remove the current annotation of the listing of the Namibian population of the African elephant in the appendices to Cites as well as a proposal to the decision making mechanisms for future ivory trade jointly submitted with South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Namibia is also co-sponsoring a Zimbabwean proposal on its elephant population as well as co-sponsoring proposals for Cites to recognise its impact on livelihoods to establish a committee of rural people to help guide Cites on the interest of rural communities.
These last two issues have largely been ignored in previous decision making by CITES, said Shifeta.