SA fails to tell UN about elephant poaching
2002-11-15 11:25
Johannesburg - South Africa said on Thursday its failure to reveal incidents of elephant poaching in one of its national parks did not affect a UN decision to allow it to sell ivory stockpiles.
But conservationists said information that five elephants were killed by poachers this year in Kruger National Park could have swayed the voting at the UN meeting in Chile.
The vote on Tuesday gave the green light to allow South Africa, Botswana and Namibia to stage one-time sales of ivory from their stockpiles in 2004 - provided it did not lead to an upsurge in poaching by criminals hoping to launder fresh tusks among the legitimate sales.
Conservationists and several countries led by Kenya staunchly opposed the move, arguing it would renew a bloodbath that saw Africa's elephant population halve to about 600 000 in around a decade before the ivory trade was outlawed in 1989.
South Africa said on Thursday the discovery of the dead elephants was made after it had prepared its submission to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) meeting in Santiago.
"...The information gathered for purposes of reporting to Cites was collected...around July and at that point, no elephants had been killed (in the year to date)," South African National Parks CEO Mavuso Msimang said in a statement.
Broad trends
He said that five elephants were subsequently found to have been poached in the northern part of the renowned game park. Msimang admitted the department failed to inform the relevant South African authorities but denied that any information was deliberately withheld from Cites.
A UN spokesperson said the information was unlikely to have affected the outcome of the vote.
"The decisions taken here would not be influenced by any individual poaching incidents. The important point is the broad trends and we have a monitoring system to track that before the 2004 sales are permitted," said Michael Williams, a spokesperson for the UN Environment Programme.
But conservationists disagreed, especially since South Africa had made its pitch on the grounds that it was capable of protecting its own elephant populations from poachers.
"This means that Cites was indeed misled," said Peter Pueschel, head of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Cites delegation.
"It is really shocking that at the same time the ivory trade is being re-opened, information about poaching is being confirmed despite South Africa telling everyone that the situation is stable and everything is under control," he said.