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Elephant's killing

on rise: report

LONDON: A London-based environmental group warned on Tuesday that last year's experimental relaxation of an international ban on ivory sales has led to a rise in the killing of elephants in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

The Environmental Investigation Agency said in a report, published ahead of next week's meeting in Kenya of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), that there is growing demand for ivory in the Far East.

CITES monitors claim that the partial resumption of ivory sales has been a success and has not led to an increase in poaching. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were authorised to sell 55 tonnes of ivory from culled elephants to Japan. The sale raised some 5 million dollars for elephant protection and community development projects.

But the EIA report said, the three African nations Ñ as well as South Africa Ñ are pressing for further ivory sales, and that illegal poaching has increased sharply.

"CITES made a huge error in allowing the resumption of the international ivory trade in 1997," said EIA chairman Allan Thornton said. "The damage to elephant populations is now obvious Ñ poachers are intensifying their efforts, illegal ivory is on the move again, and Far East markets are stirring.

"Now is the time to terminate this failed experiment before elephant poaching and illegal international ivory trade become entrenched, risking a return to the elephant poaching epidemic of the 1980s," he said.

The group has logged elephant poaching incidents across Africa and Asia since 1997, and an aerial census of Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley in 1999 pinpointed more than 1,300 carcasses.

In Kenya's Tsavo National Park, 29 elephants were killed in 1999, five times the average annual total for the previous six years, it said.

Kenya, which has been one of the most outspoken opponents of any lifting of the ban, and India, have requested that elephants regain their fully protected status.ÑAP