The Chinese ban on the legal trade in ivory is a little over a month old and although it is too early to say just how effective the ban has been, it is at least an optimistic trend. The ban has meant the closure of all ivory carving factories and retailers in China.
China has been the world’s biggest, and growing, market for both legal and illegal ivory, playing a major role in the killing of about 30 000 elephants a year in Africa.
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In recent years the legal supply of ivory came mainly from the one-off sales set-up by a number of African countries, including South Africa.
Chinese conservationists said at the implementation of the ban on the legal ivory trade a month ago, the prices of ivory products were already falling and that the market was shrinking.
Many elephant range states in both Africa and Asia have welcomed the Chinese ban, but have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.
Staying with elephants, a recent scene of rural villagers putting flowers on the bodies of two elephants killed by a night train on a railway track in the Indian state of Assam, has highlighted the problem of elephant-human contacts.
The Asian elephant is still an endangered species in India, with a population of about 26 000, but human encroachment on their natural habitat has seen a decline of 50 percent in elephant populations over the past 70 years. Indian conservation authorities are well aware of the situation and continue attempts to alleviate it.*
What a wonderful gesture, putting flowers on a dead elephant – only in India, perhaps? Moving on, Indian environmentalists have expressed grave concern at ongoing deforestation and illegal human activity in the country’s forests and jungles.
Apparently the biggest problem is urban and industrial expansion onto agricultural land, with the result that farmers are moving into forests and jungles more and more, using the age-old slash and burn method of clearing land. Environmentalists have called for a national effort to stop the encroachment.*
And finally, we’ve just missed World Wetlands Day and an appropriate news story comes from the famous Lake District in north western England, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The UN body said that the Lake District fitted the cultural landscape category of World Heritage Sites because of its natural beauty and its links with the so-called Lake School of romantic poets. However, it also expressed concern about the conservation of the area, saying that uncontrolled tourism may prove a problem.**
We had a wonderful few days in the Lake District National Park some years ago, staying with friends in their little stone cottage – he was a ranger with the park and she an environmental consultant, so we were taken to some of those hidden corners that were particularly special. I do hope we were not seen as part of “uncontrolled tourism”.
*Save the Elephants News Service.
**The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media.
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