Zimbabwe rallies allies to push for legal ivory trade

Zimbabwe will push for the legalization of the ivory trade this week, inviting officials from 15 countries to a meeting in a national park that has been a model for elephant conservation.

Hwange National Park is overrun with elephants, which now routinely venture outside the park’s boundaries to feed, sometimes resulting in deadly clashes with locals.

Zimbabwe and its southern African neighbors have seen their elephant herds thrive in recent years, and they now house roughly 70% of the continent’s elephants.

That’s a markedly different story than in the rest of Africa, where poaching and habitat loss have seen numbers declining.

Zimbabwe, by contrast, is home to 100,000 elephants — nearly double the number that conservationists say the country’s parks can support.

Elephants require vast areas for feeding. Even Hwange, a park nearly half the size of Belgium, isn’t big enough to support its population.

Zimbabwe and other countries with large herds say they’re left protecting vast stockpiles of ivory they can’t sell to raise funds for either conservation work or to support communities affected by the growing elephant numbers.

“These are pertinent issues that are difficult to address in a balanced manner,” Tourism and Environment Minister Mangaliso Ndhlovu said in a statement.

Zimbabwe last week urged European ambassadors to allow a one-off sale of $600 million worth of elephant ivory, kept in a warehouse outside central Harare.

International trade in ivory and elephants has been banned since 1989 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). One-off sales were allowed in 1999 and 2008, despite fierce opposition.

Countries in southern Africa say the ban prevents them even from supporting each other’s conservation efforts, for example, by moving elephants from Zimbabwe to countries that want to repopulate.

The conference brings together countries likely to support a legalization move, including China and Japan, where ivory is highly prized.

Kenya and Tanzania, which fear legalization will encourage more poaching, were not invited. But the island nations of Seychelles and Madagascar, which have no elephants, are attending.

A collection of 50 anti-ivory trade organizations issued a statement warning that opening the ivory market would decimate the African herd, which in some regions is near extinction.

“The conference is sending a dangerous signal to poachers and criminal syndicates that elephants are mere commodities, and that ivory trade could be resumed heightening the threat to the species,” they said.

But growing elephant herds pose real dangers to nearby communities.

According to Zimbabwe, elephants have killed 60 people so far this year, compared to 72 total last year.

“Governments in elephant range states are under social and political pressure to explain why elephants are prioritized over their own lives and livelihoods,” Ndhlovu explained.