FWS crushes ivory supply in symbolic blow against poachers

DENVER -- Views of the downtown skyline and the snowcapped Rocky Mountains were obscured yesterday by a thick haze of ivory dust.

In a bid to raise awareness of what many experts warn is a global spike in wildlife trafficking, the Fish and Wildlife Service pulverized its 6-ton stockpile of seized elephant ivory.

Tusks by the hundreds -- many of them whittled into elaborate figurines, ceremonial bowls, canes and even billiards cues -- were hauled to a massive blue industrial rock crusher at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge about 10 miles northeast of downtown.

The ivory, accumulated over 25 years, was seized during undercover investigations of organized smugglers or at the U.S. border. It clattered in the crusher's metallic hopper and was spit out 40 feet away as dust and small debris.

The tusks and trinkets represented an estimated 3,000 dead elephants -- a small fraction of a global ivory trade that conservation officials believe was responsible for the killing of 30,000 elephants in 2012 alone.

The U.S. ivory could have been worth upward of $12 million had it been sold on the world market, considering that just a pound of it can fetch more than $1,000 on the streets of China.

But selling the ivory -- a past strategy used with mixed success to depress global ivory prices -- would have sent the wrong message to would-be poachers and buyers of illegal ivory and would have complicated efforts to curb the domestic trade, said current and former Obama administration officials.

"We have to address this as a moral and ethical issue," said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, who argued that legal ivory in the U.S. market offers a "smoke screen" that hinders the seizure of illegal wildlife parts.

"The key to ethics is social approbation of behaviors that are contrary to standard custom," Ashe said. "What we need to do is establish a standard custom, which is that ivory belongs to the elephants in the wild."

Government and conservation officials here broadly condemned the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) decision in 2008 to allow China and Japan to purchase $15 million in stockpiled ivory from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The sale did little to quench China's soaring demand.

Paula Kahumbu, a Kenyan biologist and wildlife conservationist, said her country's decision in 1989 to burn its ivory stockpile sent a powerful signal to Kenyans that their tourism-based economy was at stake.

But even though elephant populations rebounded in the 1990s as a result of beefed-up conservation, the illegal ivory trade has seen a resurgence in the past decade, buoyed by demand in China as more of its population ascends to the middle class.

Once an opportunistic, regional enterprise, poaching and trafficking are now led by sophisticated criminal networks, many of which also trade in illegal guns and drugs, U.S. officials said.

Over the past decade, an estimated 11,000 forest elephants were killed in Gabon's Minkebe National Park alone. The total population of Central Africa's forest elephants plunged 62 percent over that same period, FWS said.

Elephant massacres have taken place in Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic in the past year.

"The poaching is escalating, and it's practically out of control," said Kahumbu, who is also a National Geographic emerging explorer. More than 300 elephants were killed last month in Zimbabwe's largest game park after poachers poisoned their watering holes with cyanide, Kahumbu said.

Poaching is "back with a vengeance," said David Hayes, former Interior deputy secretary who serves on the eight-member presidential Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking, a nongovernmental panel that will help federal officials develop a national strategy for combating wildlife trafficking.

"The U.S. has got to act and act decisively," Hayes said. "By destroying the U.S. stock of ivory, we are forthrightly acknowledging ivory for what it really is, a death warrant for the world's elephants."

Should U.S. stop 'vanity sales'?

Yesterday's crushing was the latest in the Obama administration's efforts to curb a black market for wildlife parts that brings in at least $19 billion a year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. That ranks fourth behind trade in narcotics, counterfeiting and human trafficking.

President Obama in July signed an executive order aimed at better coordinating the U.S. response to illegal trafficking in wildlife parts. The White House also announced $10 million will be made available to help train those who fight poaching in Africa (Greenwire, July 1).

The order also created a Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking to develop by January a national strategy to coordinate U.S. efforts to combat illegal trafficking.

Ashe said Fish and Wildlife has since issued an emergency listing of the southern white rhinoceros, forbidding its import into the United States. The species is not endangered, but its horn is difficult to distinguish from those of its endangered kin, complicating the seizure of illegal rhino parts, Ashe said.

The State Department this week also announced a first-ever $1 million reward for information that would help take down a wildlife-trafficking syndicate in Asia (Greenwire, Nov. 14).

Yesterday's ivory destruction was merely symbolic, its success measured by "the number of cameras here today, the media presence," Ashe said.

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums will partner with Fish and Wildlife to repurpose the ivory debris into "thought-provoking and valueless memorials" that raise awareness of the poaching crisis, Ashe said.

Representatives of African nations, conservation officials and international media were among the hundreds who came to yesterday's invitation-only event.

Speeches were also given by actresses Kristin Davis, who starred in the HBO series "Sex in the City," and Kristin Bauer van Straten of HBO's "True Blood," who deposited into the rock crusher her own family heirloom -- an ivory bracelet imported from Japan during World War II.

But tougher policy decisions lie ahead for Obama's task force, such as whether to implement a broader moratorium on ivory trade in the United States, a policy favored by several of the conservation officials and advocates who spoke here.

The legal U.S. trade of antiques and ivory that predates wildlife protection laws has helped make the United States the second-biggest consumer of ivory products behind China.

"I personally think the U.S. should take ivory off the shelves," Hayes said. "When a consumer sees ivory for sale, that certainly gives a mixed message. It does not give the message that dead elephants are the result."

Stopping the "vanity sale" of ivory would win the hearts and the minds of Americans and send an important message to the international community, Hayes said.

Congressional action?

Ashe declined to say whether he would support a moratorium on domestic ivory sales, but he said the issue would be "front and center" for the president's task force, whose leaders include Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder, or their designates.

Ashe said such a moratorium could be implemented by Congress or through administrative action, because Fish and Wildlife oversees the movement of legal ivory in the United States.

"Obviously, there are significant issues associated with that," he said, "you know, equities related to people who own ivory products."

But in a statement yesterday, Ashe acknowledged that the United States "is part of the problem, because much of the world's trade in wild animal and plant species -- both legal and illegal -- is driven by U.S. consumers or passes through our ports on the way to other nations."

Some sportsmen's groups, including Safari Club International, would likely oppose such a moratorium, observers said. The group's Dallas chapter has stirred controversy for its plan to auction off a permit to kill an endangered black rhino in Namibia, a proposal that is also expected to raise $1 million for rhino conservation efforts (Greenwire, Oct. 31).

Ashe said the poaching crisis in Africa is not driven by sport hunting. Trophies may only be imported into the country, not sold, he said.

Kelly Keenan Aylward, Washington, D.C., office director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is based at the Bronx Zoo, said her organization is lobbying U.S. lawmakers to propose a 10- to 15-year moratorium on ivory imports, exports and interstate sales, in addition to more funding to train eco-guards and build law enforcement, investigative, judicial and prosecutorial capacity overseas.

Appropriations panels in the House and Senate both approved $45 million for the State Department to curb poaching and wildlife trafficking in fiscal 2014, though the funding is unlikely to come through unless Congress can pass an omnibus appropriations bill, she warned.

The group is also engaging sportsmen's, human rights and conservation groups to build bipartisan support for a moratorium. The group is working closely with Reps. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) and Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, she said.

Azzedine Downes, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said a full moratorium on trade in the United States is the next needed step to curb poaching.

While people can argue over how many elephants are being poached annually or how many are left in the wild -- 300,000 to 500,000, Downes said -- "when you do the math, there are 10 years left," he said.

"If we continue on the path today, all of those elephants will die in a 10-year period," he added.

But U.S. laws have also hindered the government's ability to pursue wildlife traffickers, said Robert Dreher, acting assistant attorney general.

For example, the Justice Department can confiscate wildlife parts and vehicles used to transport them but cannot pursue the proceeds of international wildlife trafficking, he said.

"At the moment, we have some handicaps," he said. "We have difficulty using money-laundering statutes to go after these criminals."

Contributing more of the agency's resources will be difficult at a time of limited federal appropriations, he added.

The State Department is also working with foreign countries to clamp down on demand.

Judy Garber, principal deputy assistant secretary for State, said world leaders at a recent Group of Eight summit for the first time elevated wildlife trafficking to a global security issue, joining guns and drug trafficking.

Curbing demand, particularly in China and Vietnam, is equally important, wildlife advocates said.

Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said education is critical in China, where one survey recently revealed that 70 percent of Chinese people did not know ivory comes from dead elephants. Many thought they come from the teeth of live elephants, she said.

"We have established a campaign to teach people having teeth from elephants means death," she said.