Still questions on the rhino trade
19 July 2013
Elephant's Ear, by Guy Rogers
WITH the proposed trade of rhino horn now officially on the table, some of the key things to pin down are where will the money go, and how will the trade be properly regulated and monitored?
While Environment Minister Edna Molewa indicated in her landmark July 3 announcement that the proceeds would go to rhino conservation, other reports indicate this is only the department’s "view”.
Rhino expert Dr Mike Knight says clarity on how the money raised will be used needs to be a cornerstone of the minister’s trade proposal if it is to have any chance of success at the 2016 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) summit in Cape Town. Otherwise the international community (there are 178 countries represented on Cites) can dismiss it as just a money-making strategy to fill South African government coffers and enrich private rhino ranchers.
South Africa’s case for trade will need to go further, says Port Elizabeth-based Knight, who is SANParks’ planning chief and also the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s African Rhino Specialist Group chairman. Cites is as much a political institution as a conservation one and although we have 73% of the world’s rhino in our country, any approved trade model will have to show benefits for rhino globally – including therefore the remaining populations in Kenya and Asia as well. This could be achieved via a tax which could be shaved off our trade proceeds and directed to these countries, where they would also need to be ring-fenced for rhino conservation.
Molewa’s argument is that supplying the scarce resource of rhino horn through carefully regulated trade will slash the present clamour for it on the black market. The Wildlife Society has called for caution to be applied and "thorough investigation and robust information” to be considered before taking the final plunge.
Knight says part of the hard work ahead for the minister’s team will be to prove how this supply and demand intervention will lead to the ultimate goals of reduced poaching and growth in rhino numbers and range.
Molewa’s deputy director-general, Fundisile Mketeni (who long ago headlined in The Herald as the first black manager of the Addo Elephant National Park), was quoted following the minister’s speech as saying a once-off sale of legal stockpiles was "the thinking” in terms of what form the trade would take.
South Africa has 18 tons of stockpiled horn, worth about R10-billion.
But a once-off sale would not be the right approach, Knight argues. It makes it difficult for South Africa to determine the market price and to gain full value from the deal, instead allowing for collusion between buyers who can then stockpile and sell on the horn.
The most important element must be razor-sharp monitoring of the passage of each horn "from source to sink” to prohibit the possibility of laundering. It is here that the DNA passport for individual horns being developed at Onderstepoort will be vital.
Depending on what is approved, the source might be the legal stockpile or, going forward, horns collected from animals which die naturally in the veld or horns harvested from live farmed animals.
The tight control on legal supply needs to be matched by the same on the consumer side. At the moment consumer countries like Vietnam and China are not putting up their hands, but if Molewa’s model is going to fly, laws there will need to be enacted and enforced.
A chilling research report by the Forum for African Investigative Reporters has revealed a rotten corps of South African safari operators and customs officials who together with some Mozambican politicians are facilitating a "mad scramble” to rip as many rhino horns as possible out the Kruger National Park.
Asked about this and how it would affect the benefits of legal trade, Knight is cautiously optimistic.
Corruption can be countered by improving monitoring and enforcement – and the political will is there to achieve this on the South African side, he says. Necessary capacity will come with grasp of the detail of the trade regulations.
Earth Afrika argues that rhino poaching is actually terrorism as defined in South Africa and by the African Union – a deadly, systematic assault on a flagship natural resource which is also killing our rangers and soldiers, wracking up huge protection and loss costs, jeopardising our key tourism industry and flouting our law.
That we have to use the benign instrument of trade to overcome these scumbags when they should be blown out the water rankles. But, just possibly, where all else so far has failed, it could work.
