KENYA: Continious Smuggled Ivory

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) Chairman, Richard Leakey said, “Basically there is a big market and where there is a big market that is illegal, people will find a way to supply it. So what we have to do is somehow persuade people who buy elephant ivory that doing so they are destroying the most valuable animals on our planet. Now, although we did stop the ivory trade almost completely in the early 90s it has come back again.”

The event was formed to fight the poaching crisis through leaders.

Kenya has now decided to do another demonstration of our absolute opposition to the market. We are going to burn every single piece of ivory that we can in our stocks, there will be some left because of court cases, but we will burn this ivory and it will be seen by the whole world,” said Leakey.

The stockpile destroyed is worth an estimated 30 million US dollars on the black market.

The country banned ivory trade 25 years ago. Since then , the government has set fire to tonnes of ivory to discourage poaching and ivory trade. In 1989, Kenya symbolically burnt its ivory stockpile

According to wildlife conservationist group, Save the Elephants, 100,000 elephants were killed in Africa from 2010 to 2012.

Furthermore, over 30,000 elephants are poached in Africa annually due to high demand from Asia where they are sold for around 1,000 euros per kilogram.