Written by: Sara Radovic
Edited by: Keerthana Rao
"Enforcement of illegal wildlife trade is challenging because, around the world, wildlife agencies are given low priority and are severely understaffed, undertrained, and underresourced."
- Elizabeth L. Bennett
The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime was ratified in Palermo, Italy, in December 2000 to institute a legal [and political] combat against crime internationally. It includes protocols that categorize distinct aspects of organized crime considered too pivotal to mention in the first annex briefly. The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children and the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air were signed as two separate annexes, followed by the ratification of the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components, and Ammunition.
Current [and primitive] debates, however, of whether any criminal activity conducted on wildlife, specifically the smuggling of wildlife specimens, is regulated by international law and UNTOC are often disputed. Melanie Wellsmith (2011) reveals that crimes committed against the environment and animals are increasing. Awareness of green criminology is thus established, a term that Beirne et al. (2007) define as “the study of those harms against humanity, against the environment (including space) and non-human animals committed both by powerful institutions (e.g., governments, transnational corporations, military apparatuses) and also by ordinary people.”
The severity of such harms invites scientific commentary, which only affirms the harms to be deliberate elements in the increasing destruction of the environment. Endangerment [leading to extinction] of wildlife species attributed to the alarming annihilation of the biosphere because a nearly completed elimination of a species suffices for disruption in much of the natural networks and processes, such as the food web. African elephants, in particular, comprise a large portion of the ecological structure of the African grasslands and savannah. World Wildlife Fund reports that, as of 2021, approximately ninety percent of African elephants have been wiped out in the past century due to the illegal ivory trade. There remain only an estimated 415,000 elephants alive in the wild today.
The elephant is a remarkable creature. It is the largest land animal globally, with calves weighing as much as 120 kilograms at birth. They may reach up to a height of three meters and a weight of up to six tons well into adulthood. The trunk substantiates the mammal’s magnificence by the mere fact that there are one hundred fifty thousand muscle units. Known as the most sensitive organ found in any mammal, the trunk is instrumental in feeding, drinking, snorkeling, and communicating. Elephants communicate with each other in a remarkable variety of ways through sound – usually trumpet calls or seismic signals [which are sounds that vibrate the ground so that they may detect the vibrations through their bones], touch, smell, and body language.
WWF differentiates two species of the grassland mammal – African and Asian – each distinguishable by the shape of their ears. African elephants have much larger ears, often compared to the shape of the African continent, while the ears of Asian elephants are shaped like the Indian subcontinent. Their trunks differ as well; African elephants have two ‘fingers’ at the tip of their trunks, while their Asian cousins have just one.
Features considered more grandiose and extravagant than the trunk are the ivory tusks. An article released by WWF in 2016 describes ivory tusks as enlarged incisor teeth that first appear when elephants are around two years old, protruding beyond the mouths. They are composed of dentine – a hard, dense, bony tissue – and enamel – a hard tissue wrapped around the tusk that manages the most wear and tear. The tusks serve as an advantage for elephants, assisting in the protection of the trunk, the lifting of objects, the gathering and grazing of food [such as bark from trees they have stripped], and self-defense. However, the dominant tusk is often more worn down from frequent use – an attribute revealing that elephants are either left or right tusked, just as humans are left-handed or right-handed.
The tusks are, unfortunately, recognized as the most excellent source of ivory. Often referred to as “white gold,” Lemieux et al. (2009) admit it provides a substantial reward for poachers. Nevertheless, it is in such high demand as an investment commodity from consumers in China, and other countries, including Japan, Thailand, and the United States, as Siv Rebekka Runhovde (2017) construes, because of its immaculate use as carved trinkets, chopsticks, chess sets, figurines, jewelry, furniture, ornaments, and piano keys.
Poaching is the fundamental reason for the exponential decrease in the elephant population. In a winter 2018 issue, WWF records that at least 10 million wild elephants roamed through the African continent in 1930, but, as of 2016, the population had dropped by a staggering number of 111,000 elephants [in the span of approximately eleven years]. Poachers kill between twenty and thirty thousand elephants each year for their tusks, which are then traded illegally in the international market to end up as ivory trinkets eventually. Lisa M. Herrington (2013) confesses that poachers obtain the ivory by shooting the elephants – or even poisoning them so that no gunshots are heard – and then sawing off the tusks, which are then “smuggled out of Africa in shipping containers that hold everything from fish to fruit,” and the carcasses of the animals are often left behind to decompose [or for park rangers to find them].
International bans placed on the ivory trade in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries led to the somewhat relieving alleviation that the elephant population in Africa commenced recovery. Recent statistics in Kristof Titeca’s (2018) piece, however, refute said alleviation, revealing that the illegal trade in [raw] ivory has been escalating rapidly since 2007. Efforts to “help stem the flow of illegal ivory and protect Africa’s threatened elephant populations,” according to TRAFFIC (2021), have been conspired by nongovernmental organizations and African park rangers, as well as other individuals and institutions affiliated with environmental and [international] criminal law through “a phenomenal degree of attention, resources, and sacrifice.” A ban on international trade in [African] elephant ivory [and all other elephant products] was implemented in 1989 by the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, as well as the placement of the species on Appendix I of CITES, thus prohibiting any international trade of a species and its products. The Elephant Trade and Information System was then established in 1997 due to a mandate on TRAFFIC by CITES to create a database that would monitor the ivory trade. ETIS currently contains thousands of records referring to any confiscations of smuggled ivory, as well as law enforcement actions from more than one hundred nations involved in said confiscations. It provides a more accessible method of administering surveillance on any suspicious activity connected with elephant products, including ivory. Such monitoring enables officials to enforce policies more confederate with all illegal actions pertaining to the handling of ivory.
Statistics, ineptly, corroborate ivory trading to have subtly increased between 1989 and 2007 before an astoundingly exponential inflation of elephant poaching [and ivory trading] in the years following 2007. The most significant demand for ivory is in [South]east Asia; Rebecca Drury (2017) accentuates economic and infrastructure links increasingly established between Africa and Asia, with China as the largest domestic market for ivory in recent years. Attempts to thoroughly prohibit the ivory trade in all of Africa and Asia, thus, developed into attempts to ban the sale of ivory in certain domestic nations. The United Kingdom is exemplary as a demonstration of such a domestic nation to do so. Caroline Cox (2021) writes that a proposal was submitted in April of 2018 to ban the sale of ivory entirely in the country, resulting in 87.6% of respondents in support. She emphasizes the regulation of trade in ivory across jurisdictions to be regulated by international law, especially by CITES. It is illegal to buy and sell any African elephant ivory dating after 1990, hence adhering to the global ban.
One may suppose the war to end the illegal ivory trade is far from over. The implementations of CITES and ETIS, as well as an indefinite imposing of the 2018 Ivory Act in Great Britain, remain successful yet inefficient in fully forbidding all poaching of elephants and illegal trading and smuggling of ivory. New approaches may have to be taken, as it is conspicuous that an international ban failed to prevent the ivory trade, instead increasing such trading exponentially. When the question of whether UNTOC is successfully combatting the crusade for a vehement termination in the ivory trade is poised, one may be able to provide multiple answers – none of them a concrete one.
[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the first RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University.]
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