SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 168

money to their own bank accounts, as foreign donors like Norway fear. That raises the ba-
sic issue of whether the people who benefit from the parks, including the international
tourist industry, have shared with those who made the sacrifice of giving up their homes
and land for the parks.
Without clear records, Zambia will have a difficult time raising more foreign money to
help conserve the parks that support their tourism industry. The debate will continue to
rage about how to involve locals in managing the parks with jobs and training that protect
the environment and the animals while balancing that effort with rangers who can keep
away others who would destroy the park.
• • •
The evil villain at the conference was the thriving poaching business that stretches from
Africa to China, where ivory is now worth $700 a pound. At times, little distinction was
made between the Chinese and the poachers. The horns of rhinos and tusks of elephants
are prized by Chinese for carvings and, when ground into a powder, as a medicine that
falsely promises longevity and, for men, virility. There is so much money to be made that
thieves are sawing off the horns of stuffed rhinos in European museums for sale in China.
Environmental groups have conducted lengthy investigations of elephant poaching in
Africa, showing that Chinese groups are underwriting the killing and then illegally im-
porting the tusks. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Wild
Fauna and Flora (CITES) forbids the trade in new ivory from elephant tusks, so poach-
ers and their networks have devised sophisticated ways to kill the animals and serpentine
routes to smuggle in the tusks and then disguise them as old ivory that is legal to sell in
China.
Esmond Martin, one of the leading investigators of the illegal ivory trade, completed a
study in 2011 showing how China has become the main market for illegal ivory in large
part because the authorities do not enforce rules even though China has been a member
of the CITES treaty for thirty years.
In 2008, CITES made an exception and allowed the sale of old ivory in China while
continuing the international ban on any new ivory that was taken from live elephants. But
in China, where authorities do little to control the ivory market, this created a giant loop-
hole that has triggered the illegal killing of thousands of elephants in Africa. According
to Martin's report, in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, 61 percent of the 6,500 retail ivory
pieces surveyed were illegal and lacked proper identification. “Several vendors openly said
their ivory was new and illegal. This suggests that official inspections and confiscations
have not taken place in most shops.”