JOHANNESBURG, (Reuters) – What do infant mortality and elephant poaching have in common? Plenty, according to conservation groups.
Researchers have for the first time made clear connections between elephant poaching in Africa, which has been surging to meet soaring ivory demand in Asia, and factors such as poverty, as shown by high rates of child deaths, and corruption.
These links have always been suspected but never pinned down with hard data.
The findings come in a report prepared for an African elephant summit in Botswana in December by groups including TRAFFIC, which tracks the global trade in wildlife products, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Conven-tion on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Areas where child mortality and poverty are worst also see higher levels of elephant poaching, but poor villagers typically do not benefit from the illicit ivory trade.
In this regard, the ivory trade – with its long and blood-stained history – is similar to other extractive industries in Africa, which have been exploited to meet demand elsewhere with few rewards for local people. Demand for ivory – used for carvings and valued for millennia for its colour and texture – has been rising sharply in newly affluent Asian countries, notably China, fuelling a new wave of elephant slaughter.
Following a decline in the 1990s, poaching of the world’s largest land mammal has risen dramatically and in 2012 an estimated 15,000 elephants were illegally killed at 42 sites in Africa monitored by MIKE – the U.N.-backed programme for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants.
Since 2010, elephant poaching levels in Africa have exceeded 5 percent of the total population – a tipping point because killings are now outpacing the animals’ birth rate.
In a related trend, the killing of rhinos for their horns – used in traditional medicine in Vietnam and China – has also soared, notably in South Africa, home to the vast majority of the animals.
According to South African government statistics, as of Dec. 19, a record 946 rhinos had been poached in the country in 2013, compared to 668 in all of 2012.
POVERTY PROXY
The report found a striking link between infant mortality rates – measured by the number of deaths of infants under one year old per 10,000 live births – and the illegal killing of elephants.
“Human infant mortality, which is interpreted as a proxy for poverty, is the single strongest site-level correlate … with sites suffering from higher levels of poverty experiencing higher levels of elephant poaching,” the report said.
The relationship be-tween poverty and poaching – in Africa and elsewhere – has long been assumed because wildlife is a source of food or money for impoverished rural dwellers.
But links between measurements of poverty and living standards, such as infant mortality, and the illicit killing of elephants, have not been made before with the kind of clarity that researchers have found in the data over the past two years.
Julian Blanc, a co-author of the study and acting coordinator for MIKE, told Reuters infant mortality was the best barometer for poverty because data for it, based on work by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, exists at local levels.
It can therefore be linked to localised incidents of elephant poaching, making it far more useful than other measurements such as per capita GDP, which can give a skewed picture, especially in countries with high levels of inequality.
Ziama in Guinea, Niassa in Mozambique, and Bangassou in Central African Republic were the three areas covered in the report with the highest rates of infant mortality, ranging from 1,240 to almost 1,400 deaths per 10,000 live births.
All three areas also had extremely high levels of elephant poaching. In the case of Ziama, its elephant population is small but has been reduced by over half in the past few years.
The next four areas in the infant mortality rankings were all found in Democratic Republic of Congo. The report also found, using Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, that at the national level “high poaching levels are more prevalent in countries where governance is weaker, and vice versa”.
Poverty and governance are the “enabling” factors for poaching, with consumer demand the other key link in the chain.
Poor governance and high poverty levels overlap between countries such as Congo and Central African Republic, which are also areas where local people see little value in elephant populations.
“In many parts of Africa people living with elephants derive no benefits from that coexistence and only bear costs in terms of crop damage, injury or death,” Blanc said in a telephone interview from his Nairobi base.
TROPICAL, LAND-LOCKED
Many of these countries – such as Central African Republic – also suffer from the development curses of having tropical climates, which impose the heavy disease burden seen in their infant mortality rates, and being landlocked, which imposes economic costs.
Still, that does not mean that wildlife in such places could not be utilised in a way that might bring economic benefits. Heavily forested and tropical Gabon, for example, is building a wildlife tourist industry aimed at the more adventurous.
But elsewhere in central Africa, elephants, a natural resource that could lift rural economies in the form of eco-tourism, or even a regulated ivory trade down the road, are being exterminated, depriving future generations of potential income.
Such poverty traps serve as a sobering reminder, against the backdrop of the “Africa Rising” narrative, that much of the world’s poorest continent is still being excluded from the region’s dynamic economic growth and investment story.
