Tanzania, Africa

With populations in Western and Central Africa virtually gone, the mass killing is now spreading to East and Southern Africa. Criminal networks smuggle raw ivory into China, where it is carved into luxury items, fueling a multi-billion dollar trade. If the trade continues the African elephant could become extinct in 15 years.  Every elephant is at risk. We are losing much more than just an individual elephant. We are losing families. Elephants have an amazing memory and can live 60-70 years. They are much more connected to each other than even humans are these days. The reason why thousands and thousands of elephants are killed every year is because there is a legal market in China. The problem is that this legal market can rely only on small quantities of ivory that the Chinese government distributes every year, about 5 tons. The demand is much higher. Thus the reason for illegal ivory. Imagine if there was a legal market in Europe for cocaine or heroin. It would be really easy to launder cocaine and sell it as legal. It is exactly the same for ivory. China has a legal market for something that is basically illegal all over the world. Hundreds of tons of ivory enter into China every year. Ivory trafficking is a serious business. There are powerful individuals making a lot of money and they are able to control politicians or security officers, so it makes it harder to go to the police to report a crime. Traders in ivory want extinction of elephants. That is probably the biggest danger. The less elephants there are, the more the price rises, the more that people want to kill them. It is a never ending cycle that will end up  bringing them exactly what they want, extinction. Workers get paid 6% for the killing of the elephant and carrying of the tusks. Old men, with all the hardships they face in the bush and the life they risk, sell their products for 6% while the one selling the ivory to China goes away with 94%. If this business continues, there’s no chance for our sons and daughters to find an elephant in Africa. They can only hear of an elephant in the history books and see elephants in pictures. Within the past five years, elephants have gone from 100,000 only to come down to 50,000. We cannot sit down and look at this happening. It pains me a lot to see these greedy men who just want to get easy money by merely killing, ruthlessly, these animals. It’s people and wildlife living together in the same place. Where an elephant starts to damage farmland, that farmer is not going to view an elephant positively. As long as that continues to happen, poaching is something that is going to be excepted. At the very least, it is getting rid of something that is ruining livelihood. How have we gotten to this stage as a human race? We just lay waste to anything we value, anything we see just gets consumed. There are over 100 shops in Hong Kong that sell ivory.  In China, ivory is a luxury item that some rich people see as a status  symbol. Many people still see animals as natural resources that they can use. This is why everyone buys diamonds, why everyone buys gold. It is not like in the west that most people see animals as living beings that they are. The ivory investors are stockpiling the ivory because they are sure the prices are going to keep rising. When ivory was outlawed back in 1989, they registered their stock with the Hong Kong government. But the record was not in detail. So when the ivory is sold, illegal ivory is used to fill up stock. And the ivory is legalized this way. The government has absolutely no idea how to regulate this. The system in Hong Kong is heavily flawed. What do we do? It is more than fighting a war. The most difficult part is to identify the enemy. The business itself is conducted secretly. The buyer is secret. the seller is secret, the killer is secret. Everything is secret. Very different from conventional war. Fighting anti-poaching is also saving Africa from terrorists. Some of the poachers, they go hunting for elephants, sell the ivory, get money, buy more arms for their jihad war, which is terror war. In Vietnam, a village name Nhi Khe is special as pertaining to the ivory and its trade. Other villages have potential risks of getting caught by police. People there have their connections. They will bribe the Vietnamese and Chinese police in order to get the ivory across the border. It only becomes a problem if you can’t pay them off. Millions and millions of dollars and a gigantic quantity of ivory keeps getting into China, it’s a  black hole.  It is a war zone. The poachers are traffickers, each one is trying to win. We cannot allow them to win the war. Elephants are led by a dominant mother who is making the decisions of where to go when and if one is to lose that mother figure, suddenly we are left with teenagers, we are left with young animals having to make decisions without any historical memory in a world that is massively dangerous and threatening. As long as ivory is worth money, these poor animals are going to be annihilated. The poachers will keep going until the elephants are finished. Are we really in our generation going to allow the biggest mammal on earth to disappear? Losing elephants from Africa is just a slow erosion of humanity. What’s next? We lose a rhino? A giraffe? A lion? Suddenly we are going to have an empty world full of people but nothing wild. It’s a global responsibility, the world wants elephants. Sadly, Africa continues to face unprecedented challenges in terms of poaching driven by the flourishing illegal trade in wildlife parts. The elephant population has crashed from 1.3 millions in 1979 to now just 400,000. The rangers face grave danger every day. Over the last 10 years, over 1,000 rangers have given their lives in the name of conservation. We live in a story world when an  elephant requires the sacrifice of a human being for its own survival. There are some locals of China trying to bring this issue to light. There are high hopes that the government will wake up and make it better when they see what the traders are doing, legal traders doing illegal stuff. A one man war can never be won. Working together to be sure that these endangered animals grow again to the old numbers where there was once over 100,000 elephants in Tanzania. When the buying stops, the killings will stop too. The stockpiles of ivory in Kenya are burned and taken out of the circuit. The ivory is being moved so vastly across continents, sold under the table, it is black money that is fueling international crime. This in an international problem, it’s not Africa’s problem. The individuals fighting this battle can’t fight it alone, it’s too big, it’s too complex. Fencing development is the future when you look at Africa. There is no choice involved, it’s going to happen. The people of Africa want the same things that everyone else wants. They want to be able to have a T.V., they want to have a house which is not knocked over. They want to be able to store their food in an area where an animal doesn’t get in there and finish it. Internet, which nobody really has and without it they will never agree to living with the wildlife unless they get the best of both worlds. The United States and China have made a commitment to stop ivory trade. US president Obama and China president announced that they will ban commercial trade of ivory in their respective countries. China and Hong Kong are home to the largest ivory market in the world, while the United States is one of the worlds largest wildlife markets. In April of 2016, Kenya destroyed its entire stockpile of 105 tons of ivory. More than 600 tons still remain in government stockpiles across Africa. In July 2016, the US banned all trade in ivory. Hong Kong has announced to end it by 2021. Meanwhile, an elephant is killed approximately every 15 minutes. The fight continues.

Join the fight at www.TheIvoryGame.com