Elephant-rich states back-pedal on threat to quit trade body

A group of southern African countries - where two-thirds of the world’s African elephants live – have back-pedalled on a threat to leave an international governmental body that regulates trade in endangered species and their products.

Mangaliso Ndlovu, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, said a document tweeted by a government spokesman in which the countries threatened to leave the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was a draft.

“A pull-out is not yet up for discussion,” Ndlovu, whose surname means elephant in the Ndebele language, said last Thursday after the close of an elephant summit in Hwange, Zimbabwe’s biggest national park. “We don’t want to get to that level just yet.”

Still, resolutions adopted after the meeting showed the dissatisfaction of southern African states with CITES, which blocks trade in live elephants from many countries where they live and has completely halted trade in ivory.

Elephants killing farmers

While the World Wildlife Fund estimates that there are only 415 000 African elephants, compared with 10 million in 1930, their population has been growing rapidly in southern Africa, home to 293 000 of the animals.

In countries such as Botswana and Zimbabwe, which have the world’s two biggest populations, governments say the increasing number of elephants are raiding crops and killing farmers more frequently and are reducing biodiversity by tearing down trees.

At a CITES meeting in Panama later this year, the states should “make a clarion call for CITES not to interfere in domestic trade, the sovereignty of states and their rights to sustainable use of wildlife”, one of the official resolutions read. In addition to Zimbabwe and Botswana, they were also backed by Tanzania, Zambia and Namibia.