Standing Committee Onto Elephant Range States example essay topic

In June 1997, at the 10th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to CITES in Harare, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia put forward proposals to transfer their elephant populations from Appendix I to Appendix II, in order to trade internationally in ivory, other elephant parts and live specimens. Many West, Central and East African countries expressed strong concerns that resumed international ivory trade might have a damaging impact on their own, often smaller and more vulnerable elephant populations. After several days of intense pressure form the highest levels of the Southern African governments, non-stop negotiation, acrimonious debate and a series of secret ballots, a single amended proposal passed by secret ballot. By abstaining, the European Union nations swung the vote in favour of the downlisting.

Many African elephant range states were opposed, including Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon and Ivory Coast. Other opponents included India, Nepal and Vietnam, Israel, Australia and the US. After the final secret ballot, the US publicly announced that it had voted against the amended proposal because of concerns that renewed trade could trigger a general upsurge in poaching. (1) The elephant populations of Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia were thus transferred to Appendix II with an annotation to allow a single "experimental" export of raw ivory from declared stocks, excluding poached and confiscated ivory, from these countries to Japan. t stated that "a comprehensive, international monitoring system shall be established under the supervision and direction of the Standing Committee with the objectives of: i) measuring and recording current levels and trends of illegal hunting and trade in ivory in African and Asian range States, and in trade entrepots; ii) assessing whether and to what extent observed trends are a result of changes in the listing of elephant populations in CITES appendices and / or the resumption of legal international trade in ivory; and ) establishing an information base to support the making of decisions on appropriate remedial action in the event of any problems with compliance or potential detriment to the species"; The Parties also agreed a number of strict conditions to be met by the southern African nations before the experimental ivory trade could take place.

These were set out in Decision 10.1 "Conditions for the resumption of trade in African elephant ivory from populations transferred to Appendix II at the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties". This Decision obliged Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to: correct deficiencies in enforcement and control measures identified by the CITES Panel of Experts (this also applied to Japan); withdraw their reservations to the Appendix I listing of the African elephant prior to the entry into force of the transfer to Appendix II; commit to international law enforcement through appropriate mechanisms such as the Lusaka Agreement; establish or strengthen mechanisms to reinvest trade revenues into elephant conservation; and comply with precautionary undertakings detailed in their supporting statements to the downlisting proposals. (2) To date, neither Zimbabwe, Botswana or Namibia have joined the Lusaka agreement or developed any similar international wildlife enforcement agreement. Failure to enact this important pre-condition violates the terms attached to the resumption of ivory trade to Japan. Comprehensive international systems to monitor and report legal and illegal ivory trade and illegal hunting of elephants were also made a condition of international ivory trade in Decision 10.1 Part A (i), which stated that trade in ivory could not resume unless: "The relevant range States, the CITES Secretariat, TRAFFIC International and any other approved party agree to: i) an international system for reporting and monitoring legal and illegal international trade, through an international database in the CITES Secretariat and TRAFFIC International; and ii) an international system for reporting and monitoring illegal trade and illegal hunting within or between elephant range States, through an international database in the CITES Secretariat, with support from TRAFFIC International and institutions such as the IUCN / SSC African Elephant Specialist Group and the Lusaka Agreement". (3) To address the concerns of elephant range States that feared an upsurge of elephant poaching, Decision 10.1 Part A (g) charged the Standing Committee with agreeing a mechanism for halting trade and re transferring one or more of the elephant populations to Appendix I if the conditions were not met or if there was an escalation of illegal hunting or of illegal trade owing to the resumption of legal trade.

(4) It was widely assumed that the monitoring systems called for in Decision 10.1 and Res. Conf. 10.10 would play a key part in that mechanism. The CITES Secretariat was charged with verifying the fulfilment of these conditions and the Standing Committee with agreeing that all the conditions had been met before trade in raw ivory could resume. (5) The Standing Committee were further charged with evaluating any negative impacts of the experimental trade. (6) In December 1997, TRAFFIC, the World Conservation Union and the Species Survival Commission (IUCN / SSC) held a workshop in Nairobi to develop a framework for the CITES-administered systems which would monitor the impact of renewed international ivory trade. A critically important aspect of any such system would be its clear ability to demonstrate "causality", determining whether any increase in elephant poaching is linked to the resumption of international ivory trade.

The participants recommended two new systems: an integrated Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS) based on an expansion of TRAFFIC's existing Bad Ivory Database System (BIDS), collecting data on trade in all elephant products, including ivory; and a system for "Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants", since known as MIKE, for which there was no existing operational structure. The workshop concluded "such a system would not be in place in time, or able to collect sufficient data, to provide any analysis for the Standing Committee meeting in 1999". It therefore proposed an "Interim System for 1999" to supply data for the 1999 meeting at which the Standing Committee would determine whether limited commercial trade in ivory and other elephant products could commence. The Interim System would be based on a request from the CITES Secretariat to range States to supply data on elephant poaching and enforcement since 1990. (7) Clearly such a system does not constitute an "international monitoring system".

It is merely a voluntary national system with no possibility of an independent international assessment of poaching levels. Moreover the Interim System relies on the resources, priorities, goodwill and integrity of range States to fully and accurately report incidents of poaching. Elephant poaching in Zimbabwe has increased dramatically in the Zambezi Valley according to a recent WWF-SARTO aerial census which estimated 1,378 elephant carcasses. (8) Allegations that the Zimbabwean authorities have purposefully failed to submit full details of the extent of poaching suggest that this alarming increase in poaching since the downlisting will not be detected by the Interim Reporting System. (9) Thus the comprehensive international monitoring system which member nations had required as a condition of renewed ivory trade was already significantly diluted at a preliminary stage - without any formal discussion by the Parties to CITES.

The burden of proof had been effectively shifted to range States, contradicting the intent of Decision 10.1. In March 1998, at the 40th meeting of the CITES Standing Committee, the Secretariat's Elephant Co-ordinator acknowledged that even the stop-gap Interim System proposed for 1999 was unlikely to prove viable. He pointed out that expecting African range States to assemble national illegal off-take figures on an annual basis was unrealistic as. ".. for most range States there are no existing national poaching statistics". (10) Despite this warning from its own Elephant Co-ordinator, the Standing Committee agreed that the Secretariat should develop a National Reporting Form for the Interim System and should also distribute an Incident Reporting Form to initiate collection of data that might provide an early warning of poaching problems.

IUCN / SSC were also requested to continue developing MIKE as a long-term site based system to monitor illegal killings. (11) The Secretariat distributed its "Incident Report Form on Illegal Hunting of Elephants" in March 1998. (12) "The National Reporting Form on Illegal Killing of Elephants" was distributed three months later. The Secretariat noted that the returns would be "used to conduct an analysis of the possible effects of the amendments to the CITES appendices on the killing of elephants" and that the results would be presented to the Standing Committee.

(13) The forms were drawn up without meaningful consultation with elephant range States and were considered to be overly complicated, cumbersome and very time consuming to fill out for under resourced wildlife departments in Africa and Asia. (14) By 31 December 1998, one month before the Standing Committee were due to take the decision whether or not to allow the experimental ivory trade, only three countries had returned the National Reporting Form. (15) The system for monitoring the effects of the renewed international ivory trade existed only in theory. A separate report presented to the 40th CITES Standing Committee meeting discussed potential mechanisms for halting trade and returning populations to Appendix I as required by Decision 10.1 Part A (g). This noted that "there is no way in which elephant populations can be 'immediately' transferred to Appendix I by the Conference of the Parties", since changes to Appendices required a proposal by a Party as specified in Article XV of the Convention. (16) The Standing Committee therefore agreed that the mechanism employed would be a Standing Committee request to the Depositary Government, Switzerland, to make a proposal to return one or more elephant populations to Appendix I, if necessary by postal procedures.

The Committee would also request the relevant countries to immediately cease commercial trade in raw ivory. (17) It was agreed that two sets of circumstances should trigger such action. Firstly if there was a failure to comply with the conditions attached to trade outlined in the previous section. Secondly if there was an escalation in illegal hunting of elephants and / or trade in elephant specimens as a result of renewed legal international trade. However, the report to the Standing Committee had noted that only the operation of the international monitoring system required by Parties in Decision 10.1 would provide the necessary information to make such a judgement about elephant poaching and illegal ivory trade. (18) This was a clear admission that if ivory auctions were approved without a comprehensive monitoring system first in place, it would be very difficult to prove that any surge in poaching could be definitively linked to the renewed trade.

Without such proof it would be very difficult, in turn, to trigger a return of southern African elephant populations to Appendix I. Yet ten months later the CITES Standing Committee approved ivory auctions in three countries with only an incomplete and inadequate interim monitoring system in place. As a result the 1999 international ivory sales were effectively an experiment without a control. In February 1999, at the 41st Standing Committee meeting, the proposal for a long-term site-based system for monitoring the illegal killing of elephants (MIKE) was presented to the Standing Committee in Geneva by the CITES Secretariat. The report was launched in the name of the IUCN / SSC African and Asian Elephant Specialist Groups, however the proposal was not produced or peer reviewed by either group, despite repeated appeals by some of their members to be allowed to participate. (19) IUCN subsequently withdrew the name of the Elephant Specialist Groups from the document, (20) as the Elephant Specialist Group members were never invited to peer review or endorse the system. The involvement of the African Elephant Specialist Group, required under Decision 10.1, did not occur.

Nevertheless the Secretariat stated its belief that the proposed system met all the requirements laid out by CITES Parties at Harare in June 1997. (21) This belief was not shared by seven African nations who rejected the proposed monitoring system outright. Kenya, Liberia, Ghana, Congo, Chad, Zambia and Mali argued that MIKE would neither provide elephant poaching data quickly enough to protect populations, nor prove a direct causal link between the CITES trade decision and the illegal killing of elephants in either Africa or Asia. They also condemned the lack of adequate consultation with range States and requested that the Standing Committee institute a peer review of MIKE and ETIS that would involve all African and Asian range States. (22) The US Government echoed these concerns in a highly critical statement to the Standing Committee meeting: "Based on our evaluation, the monitoring system cannot in the short term provide information to demonstrate that a certain level of poaching was or was not caused by the re-opening of ivory trade. Over the long-term (it) should provide useful information on trends in elephant populations and poaching of elephants, but cannot be expected to provide statistically significant conclusions as to causality, within the time frames envisioned by Decision 10.1".

(23) A legal briefing presented by WWF International warned the Standing Committee not to certify that the monitoring conditions were in place to approve the ivory sales until all these concerns had been addressed. "As a legal matter, the Standing Committee may not report that the conditions in Decision 10.1 A have been met until it finds there has been genuine agreement on a workable causality mechanism. Decision 10.1 explicitly binds the Standing Committee to determining that all of the conditions listed in 10.1 have been met before compliance can be agreed". (24) Despite these wide-ranging criticisms and concerns, the Standing Committee took the momentous step in Geneva of authorising the international commercial sale of ivory stockpiles in Namibia and Zimbabwe to Japan. The anxieties expressed by many other elephant range States were effectively ignored.

The Standing Committee agreed to set up a sub-group to further develop MIKE and Botswana's request to sell ivory was approved after the Secretariat verified that outstanding deficiencies in its ivory recording system had been corrected. The Standing Committee also agreed an operational procedure, presented by the Secretariat, whereby the Secretariat would recommend to the Committee that international trade be halted, should the Secretariat conclude that there had been an "important increase" in illegal hunting of elephants or illegal trade in elephant specimens, or non-compliance with Decision 10.1 A. (25) This procedure was agreed by the Standing Committee as the basis for implementation of paragraph (g) of Decision 10.1 A. (26) At no point in the operational procedure is the transfer of elephant populations to Appendix I mentioned, nor is there any explanation as to what specific criteria the Secretariat would use to determine an "important increase" in poaching or illegal trade. The Secretariat noted that "Information on escalation of illegal hunting of elephants will become more precise once MIKE begins to provide better information on 'background rates' of poaching". However this was meaningless since it had already been decided that the experimental ivory sale, and the Secretariat's assessment of the sale, would take place long before MIKE was implemented. The international monitoring safeguards that had played a crucial part in persuading many governments to allow the elephant downlisting in 1997 did not exist when the international ivory sales to Japan went ahead.

Yet the CITES Standing Committee did not even vote on whether auctions should proceed in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana. The burden of proof was effectively shifted by the Standing Committee onto elephant range States, requiring them to produce data on elephant poaching for use in the Interim System. It instructed the Secretariat to use the fledgling system to decide whether the experimental commercial trade triggered an 'important increase' in either illegal hunting of elephants or illegal trade in elephant specimens. (27) In practice, a severe lack of data has made it almost impossible for such a judgement to be made, despite a proliferation of reports of increased poaching in the past 16 months. By late November 1999 just four countries had submitted the National Reporting Form on Illegal Killing of Elephants. The Secretariat has also expressed disappointment at the "low number of responses" to its Incident Report Form "especially since media reports indicate incidents of poaching in a number of elephant range States.

Full participation in the monitoring and reporting systems is essential if an accurate overview of poaching is to be obtained". (28) In addition, the Ivory and Elephant Product Seizure Form, designed to feed into ETIS, has only found a "limited use" among range States, prompting the Secretariat to complain that "such a poor response from Parties precludes the Secretariat from fully carrying out its responsibility under decisions adopted at the 10th CoP". (29) Such comments appear designed to shift the blame for the monitoring systems' failure to gather adequate data from the Secretariat to the range States, many of which have extremely limited funds for wildlife conservation. In February 2000, TRAFFIC admitted that only the seizures database of ETIS was up and running with subsidiary databases on law enforcement effort still under development. A full analytical report is not expected until CoP XII in 2002 - a full three years after international ivory trading was allowed to resume.

(30). The ivory auctions, attended by Japanese buyers and CITES Secretariat observers took place under armed guard in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia in April 1999. A total of 49,574 kg of ivory, representing 5,446 tusks was purchased. (31) On 17 July 1999 all the ivory from the sales was imported into Japan.

In total, according to the CITES Secretariat, the auctions raised approximately US$5 million for the southern African governments. (32) The national breakdown and utilisation of these funds has not to date been released to the public. The Secretariat later voiced anxiety at the cost of verifying compliance with the precautionary undertakings for the sale and shipment of the raw ivory. "The Secretariat would like to raise the concern that all these activities, although they have been successfully completed, required a significant amount of human and financial resources from the Secretariat". (33).