EOZ slams Zambian delegation to talks on endangered species

Agness Changala, Zambia Post
April 8, 2010

EARTH Organisation Zambia (EOZ) has charged that the Zambian delegation went to the Convention on Endangered Species of World Flora and Fauna (CITIES) in Qatar ill-prepared.

EOZ is an organisation that reduces the rapid spread of deforestation, land degradation, climate change and its effect in Zambia.

Reacting to tourism minister Catherine Namugala’s recent blame on Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) for Zambia’s failed proposal to offload the ivory on the international market, EOZ executive director Lovemore Kapeya Muma said the Zambian delegation should have researched to find out who would be at the convention and their interests.

“So that local environmental NGOs are organised to engage and lobby these international NGOs attending the convention with the view to educate them on the local elephant situation,” he said. “As the minister said, ‘some NGOs which had never been to Zambia and knew less about the country opposed the proposal to down list elephant population on Appendix I to II’. This clearly means that very little was done to educate the environmental activists on the elephant population and the need to down list.”

Muma observed that Namugala expected the international community to be supportive of the decision they were making when very little had been done to sensitise them, especially the environmental activists, on why it was important to the Zambian people to down list.

He said it was against this backdrop that his organisation would be apprehensive to support the Zambian proposal to offload the ivory on the international market because there was a clear link between one-off sales and the rise in poaching.

Muma said environmentalists and scientists had used a revolutionary genetic technique to pinpoint the area of Africa where smugglers were slaughtering elephants to feed the worldwide illegal ivory trade.

He said according to the organisation’s findings, most recent seizures of tusks could be traced to animals that had grazed in the Selous and Niassa game reserves on the Tanzania and Mozambique borders.

Muma said their discovery also suggested that only a handful of cartels were responsible for most of the world's booming trade in illegal ivory and for the annual slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants.

“The extent of this trade is revealed through recent seizures of thousands of tusks in separate raids on docks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan. These were aimed at satisfying the far-East's growing appetite for ivory; a new status symbol for the middle classes of the region's swelling industrialised economies,” said Muma. “No wonder countries from these regions overwhelmingly supported the Zambian proposal.”

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