The 2014 Tanzania elephant census results are shocking a lot! How one can explain a loss of 65,721 elephants in a span of only five years?
According to the census results, the country, which in 2009 had 109,051 elephants, is now left with 43,330 elephants only. This represents a 60-per cent loss or rather an average of 13,144 killings a year!
But even to the surprise of scientists, who conducted the survey, about 12,000 elephants (24,000 herds), which were recorded in a mini-census conducted in the Mikumi-Rungwa ecosystem in 2013 were nowhere to be found!
“This has confused even researchers, as in the survey they only counted more than 8,000 elephants. It is not clear whether those elephants have been killed or they migrated to other ecosystems,” noted Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism Lazaro Nyalandu, when announcing the results in Arusha in June this year. The survey, which covered an area of 268,692 square kilometres of Tanzania’s total land, was conducted by researchers from Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), the Frunkfurt Zoological Society (FZS) and the Vulcan Inc of the United States.
It was conducted under $900,000 African Great Elephant Census, a $7 million Paul G Allen Foundation initiative aimed at conserving elephant populations in 13 African countries that hold about 90 per cent of the world elephant population.
The disappearance of over 12,000 elephants has prompted the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism to order for a ground re-count in September. On the other hand, the census results have awakened conservationist calls for the government of Tanzania to review its wildlife conservation policy by banning hunting of elephants, which they perceive to be enticement to poaching.
According to the UK–based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an average of 10,000 elephants a month is reported to have been killed by poachers in Tanzania in the past 10 years as demand for ivory or white diamond went high in China, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan, where they are used for ornaments and medicinal purposes.
According to the figures, in 2005 apparently as President Jakaya Kikwete was taking office, the Tanzania elephant population was recorded at 142,000 herds, but 10 years later the figure has plummeted to mere 43,033 herds, making the President’s tenure the ‘most unfortunate’ as far as the welfare of the Tanzania elephant is concerned.
The EIA report singles out Tanzania as the most affected country as far as rampant killing of African elephants is concerned, with the bulk of thousands of tonnes of ivory that are reported to be intercepted in the far eastern Asian countries’ ports originating from either the port of Dar es Salaam or Mombasa.
Poaching of the African elephant, according to the EIA, has reached alarming proportions and that if the trend goes on unchecked there is a danger their population will be wiped out from the face of the continent in less than 10 years to come.
However, despite the imminent danger facing the Tanzania elephant population, Deputy Minister for Finance Mwigulu Nchemba told Parliament in Dodoma recently that due to its enormous contribution to the national economy, the government had no intention to stop hunting tourism. Instead, the deputy minister said the government was making effort to make the sub-sector more sustainable.
“Poaching is rampant in the country. Why doesn’t the government see it wise now to ban hunting for at least 10 years as it once did some years back?” he asked.
But Nchemba who was speaking on behalf of Minister for Finance Saada Mkuya Salum maintained that the government had no intention to stop the hunting business as it was being carried out in accordance with the Wildlife Act No. 5 of 2009 and tourism hunting guidelines of 2010. According to him, TAWIRI, apart from conducting and coordinating wildlife research and advising the government on such matters, it has also the role of identifying hunting blocks, issuing hunting quotas and identifying the type of animals to be hunted. The Wildlife Division was overseeing the exercise, he explained. Apart from bringing in foreign exchange, the deputy minister said hunting was also one of the important means of curbing unemployment in the country as it employed over 4,000 people and that in a way it was also environmental protection and an animal protecting mechanism as it allowed hunting of excess animals only.
He said part of the income that the hunting companies earned was dedicated to the improvement of social services such as construction of roads, schools, dispensaries and provision of clean water.
According the deputy minister, the country earned about $18 million from the sub-sector between 2009/10 and 2013/14 hunting seasons.
But as the deputy minister pointed out, the money was earned in five years, which on average translates into only $3.6 million a year.
This is just a small amount of money compared to the staggering sum of $2.7 billion, which the country earned in 2014 alone from its under-utilised tourism resources. Additionally, tourism employs 1.2 million people.
According to some observers, what the country is purported to be earning from the hunting business is just peanuts compared to the billions of dollars believed to be siphoned out of the country by both legal and illegal players in the industry, annually.
For instance, while the government earned between $8,500 and $21,900 in hunting permits per herd of an elephant depending on the weight of their tusks, the sale of the tusks fetched between $90,000 and $120,000 in the market.
A kilo of ivory is said to be between $2,500 and $3,000, while one tusk of a fully grown elephant can weigh up to 20 kilo. According to reports, Tanzania has been losing an average of 240,000 tusks a year! In monetary terms this translates into a wobbling $28 billion a year. While poaching has been cited as a major problem in conservation efforts, some reports have been pointing an accusing finger at some unscrupulous wildlife officials, who are allegedly colluding with some hunting companies to violate hunting quotas for personal gains. In one incident for instance, the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism had to revoke a hunting licence belonging to Green Miles Safaris Limited after its guests were involved in acts contravening hunting laws and regulations.
Video footages showed some members of the group hunting immature and female animals, while some were using sub-machine guns to kill the animals, while their accompanying teenagers were also shown hunting contrary to the law.
In another development, reports in a section of the local media, accused the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism of having misused presidential hunting permits by allocating a family of an American tycoon eight free such permits containing a list of 800 animals of different species including eight elephants.
The tusks from the eight elephants alone could have fetched over $1,200,000, leave alone trophies from other games on the list which included lions and leopards.
Apparently, Tanzania and Kenya, which share the same conservation ecosystem across their common border, have been badly affected by the problem of poaching especially of elephants and rhinos.
With Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority lying on the Tanzanian side and Amboseli and Maasai Mara National parks on the Kenyan side, thousands of wild games move freely across the two countries in search for pasture, water and breeding grounds. With the Tanzania elephant population having decreased so drastically, one would have anticipated Tanzania to declare a total ban on hunting just like Kenya did some years ago.
Kenya clamped down the ban on elephant hunting in 1971 followed by a total ban in hunting of all types of wildlife in 1977. And although the Kenyan move has managed to reduce poaching cases to minimal levels, its elephant population has not been able to re-generate accordingly.
However, despite the ban on hunting and the fact that the country’s Tourism revenue has experienced a downward trend of almost 7 per cent since year 2008 due to the bombings of the American Embassy in Nairobi and the consequently prolonged Al-Shaabab linked attacks which have impacted negatively on the country’s tourist inflow, the country managed to register some 100 billion Kenya shillings (about 1.2 billion US dollars) from the industry in 2014.
A different approach in dealing with the problem of poaching between the two neighbouring countries, according to some observers, is one of the reasons behind the failure in anti-poaching efforts.
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