By Rachel Fobar, GENEVA
Countries have voted against decreasing
protections for southern white rhinos at
the 18th Conference of the Parties for CITES,
the wildlife trade treaty, underway in Geneva, Switzerland. International trade
in rhino parts has been banned since 1977, but at this year’s conference,
Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Namibia proposed loosening restrictions for
their respective countries. The vote still needs to be finalized at the plenary
session at the end, when all appendix change proposals passed in committee are
officially adopted.
"I was encouraged and relieved to see parties
resoundingly reject the proposal calling for legal international trade in rhino
horn," says Taylor Tench, a wildlife policy analyst for the Environmental
Investigation Agency. "Rhino populations remain under immense pressure
from poaching and illegal trade, and legalizing trade in rhino horn would have
been disastrous for the world’s remaining rhino populations....Now is simply
not the time to weaken protections for rhinos."
Other
countries, including Kenya and Nigeria, worry that legalizing the trade would
undermine the survival Africa’s wild rhinos.
“Humankind
can do without rhino horn,” said a representative from Kenya during the debate.
“It is not medicine.”
Thought to be
extinct in the late 1800s, the southern white rhino is classified today
as near
threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), which determines the conservation status of species. There are
about 18,000 in protected areas and private game reserves today, almost all in
South Africa, according to the IUCN. Black rhinos,
which are smaller and have a hooked rather than square lip, are classified
as critically
endangered, with only about 5,000 remaining. They’re found mostly in
Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya.
In 2005,
Eswatini allowed the noncommercial trade in live rhinos and hunting trophies
but not rhino horn. The country put forward a failed
proposal to open the commercial rhino horn trade at the last
CITES Conference of the Parties, in 2016. Eswatini’s white rhino population
reached 90 in 2015, but following one of the country’s worst droughts in recent
history, it had fallen to just 66 by December 2017. This year, the
country re-upped a
proposal to allow for commercial trade in their rhinos,
including horn and parts. In a 25-102 vote by secret ballot, this measure was
defeated.
Meanwhile,
Namibia proposed that
CITES down list its southern white rhinos from Appendix I to Appendix II, with
an annotation allowing for trade in live rhinos and export of hunting trophies.
Though this move would technically weaken protections, conservationists said it
wouldn’t have any significant implications in practice, since Namibia is
already allowed non-commercial trade in live rhinos and hunting trophies under
the Appendix I listing.
In the
proposal, Namibia argued that its population no longer warrants the highest
protection under CITES and that the restriction preventing export for
“primarily commercial purposes” has held the country back from generating
revenue for conservation. From 2008 to 2018, Namibia exported 27 white rhinos
to Angola, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Africa.
Namibia’s proposal anticipates creating “access to a far larger market for
white rhinos,” especially with its primary trading partner South Africa. The
country has nearly a thousand rhinos, and according to the CITES secretariat, the
population is “increasing.”
“We are
deeply concerned that unjustified trade restriction on the Namibian white rhino
population, if not removed, will only deprive Namibia of their required
resources to manage its populations effectively,” said a representative from
Namibia during the debate.
Nonetheless,
says Tench of the EIA, Namibia’s rhinos are at risk from poaching, which has
intensified since 2014. The proposal was narrowly rejected in a 39-82 vote.
Hundreds of
rhinos are poached every year—an average of about three a day, according to
Tench—mostly for their horns. Made of keratin (the same protein that makes up
our hair and fingernails), rhino horn is often used as a cure-all in
traditional medicine in China, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Asia. Because southern
white rhinos are more abundant and live in more open habitat, they’ve borne the
brunt of the poaching, Tench says. (Go inside the
deadly rhino horn trade.)
Eswatini says
it has nearly 730 pounds of stockpiled rhino horn, with a commercial value of
$9.9 million. Funds from sales of that rhino horn, it contends in its proposal,
would have helped conservation efforts.
“Money is at
the very core of the matter,” said a representative from Eswatini during the
debate. “If the finance is not available to protect them, rhinos will continue
to die.”
Opening the
commercial rhino horn trade could have had disastrous implications, Tench says.
It could have spawned a parallel illegal market, stimulated new demand for
rhino horn, increased poaching, and created an enforcement burden for
officials, who would have been tasked with the impossible responsibility of
distinguishing legal from illegal rhino horn. “It ultimately could just kick
off a new wave of demand that would be met by increased poaching. And
Eswatini—it’s not the country that even could hope to supply rhino horn
internationally. They have 66 rhinos.”
What’s more,
the trade in rhino horn is illegal in China and Vietnam, where demand for rhino
horn exists, and leading conservationists to ask: Who would have engaged
Eswatini in the rhino horn trade?
Neither China
nor Vietnam has declared any intention to legalize the trade, although China
flirted with the idea last October, when the
government announced that tiger bone and rhino horn could be
used legally in medical research or for traditional medicine. Soon after, a
senior official announced that China was postponing lifting the ban on rhino
and tiger parts, pending further study.
“The
suggestion that there’s value in the rhino horn that Eswatini has is kind of
false anyway, because they’re projecting that based on a black-market value and
an assumption that those legal markets would open up again,” says Matt Collis,
director of international policy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare,
an animal welfare and conservation non-profit that does works to prevent rhino
poaching.
Collis says
it’s unclear what Namibia hoped to achieve with its proposal—since under
current regulations, non-commercial trade in live rhinos and trophies is
already allowed in the country.
So, he says,
this could have been a first step toward liberalizing trade in the future,
because the proposal would have moved Namibia’s rhinos to Appendix II.
“It’s not
necessarily clear what the motivation is, unless it’s for something for the
longer term,” Collis says.
Going
forward, Collis says conservationists need to help countries who bear the
burden of protecting these species find another way to fund their efforts. “It
does need a concerted effort from the international community to offer
alternative ways of financing,” he says.
