From The Trenches In Doha

Safari Club International and Safari Club International Foundation are participating in the Fifteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES in Doha, Qatar.  The below report is a summary of the first day of work, which was not exactly exciting, except for one unsuspected intervention from Botswana.   

But before we get into that, let’s get straight where Doha is and why SCI and SCIF sent delegations here.  Doha is the capital of Qatar, an Arab Emirate on the Persian Gulf.  Doha is hosting about 1,500 people for the 15^th meeting of the countries that are Parties to the CITES treaty.  CITES regulates wildlife trade, including the shipment of hunting trophies.  SCI has been actively participating in CITES meetings since 1983, to protect your hunting rights and to make sure that wildlife is conserved.  SCI and SCI Foundation are defending sustainable use issues and support sound science to be used in decisions that may affect trade in wildlife.  For this meeting, SCI and the SCI Foundation each sent a four-person delegation.  Both delegations are chaired by Past President John Monson.

So, back to the excitement.  To put it one way, we watched Botswana launch their first spear at Kenya in this round of the Great Elephant War. 

Let us explain.  Most of you probably know that the commercial trade in elephant ivory was banned quite a while ago (1990, to be precise).  The problem with the ban is that elephants popualtions aren’t in the same condition everywhere.  Most hunters who have been in Africa know that elephants are in good shape in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and several other countries.  Those countries have been angry with the ban, because they feel that they have been punished for good management of their wildlife.  They accumulate ivory from elephants that die naturally and by seizing ivory from poachers, but they have to let it sit in storehouses instead of being able to sell it to pay the costs of elephant conservation.

In the 1997 CITES meeting in Zimbabwe, the CITES Party countries relented and gave a few countries the right to sell their stockpiles, provided the money went back into elephant conservation.  A few years later, a few more sales were authorized.  At the Doha meeting, Zambia and Tanzania are asking to be allowed to sell their ivory stockpiles and to use the money to pay for elephant conservation.  Kenya and some other African countries are trying to block that request and to impose a complete moratorium on any future ivory stockpile sales for the next 20 years.

So what happened today, which was the first day of the meeting, was that in the middle of some very mundane administrative matters, Botswana questioned the legality of the Kenyan bid to block the sales.  That caught everyone by surprise.  The issue wasn’t pursued, but the bold challenge from Botswana served notice on Kenya and its allies that the other southern African countries were going to stand shoulder to shoulder with Zambia and Tanzania and fight the Kenyan move.

Occasionally, this battle will break out in the various committee meetings and deliberations, and then it will all come to a head as the meeting closes on March 25 and the final votes are taken.