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Huge Ivory Stash Is Seized in Malaysia

“It’s extremely depressing,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, one of the world’s most renowned elephant researchers, who has been studying the ivory trade for more than 30 years. “The price of ivory is making this situation insane.”

Fueled by growing demand from Asia, especially from China, the price of ivory has shot up to more than $1,000 per pound in some markets. As a result, tens of thousands of elephants are being slaughtered each year in Africa — more than at any time in the past two decades — and some scientists say the survival of the species may be endangered. Much of the ivory is used for chopsticks, bookmarks, figurines and other trinkets.

Malaysia is a well-known transit point. Malaysian authorities said Tuesday that they had discovered the ivory, which they said totaled 24 tons, packed in two shipping containers, concealed in stacks of neatly sawed wood.

“Inside the wood there were secret compartments that were filled with elephant tusks,” said a customs director, Azis Yaacub, according to Agence France-Presse.

Photographs from the seizure showed that the compartments were built to look like stacks of mahogany, but were in fact three feet deep and crammed with ivory. The shipment was labeled floor tiles.

According to Malaysian authorities, the shipment took a circuitous route, originating in the small West African nation of Togo, then going north to Spain, then east to Malaysia’s port of Klang and eventually destined for China. It is not clear where in Africa the ivory was from; conservationists say Togo is an emerging hub in the underground ivory trade and therefore the ivory might have been drawn from elephants killed across the continent.

Law enforcement officials have said that only well-oiled criminal syndicates have the money and skill to organize such large shipments. With the help of corrupt officials, they move hundreds of pounds of tusks thousands of miles across the globe, often using specially made shipping containers with such secret compartments. In some ports, like Mombasa, Kenya, only a relatively small percentage of containers is inspected, and ivory has been concealed in shipments of items including avocados and anchovies. Sometimes it is wrapped in chili peppers to throw off sniffer dogs.

But the ivory trade involves much more than organized crime. Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem — both feeding off and fueling instability in turbulent nations.

Beyond that, members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and the military of newly independent South Sudan — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory.

“One wonders when this is going to end,” said Dr. Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of a nonprofit wildlife organization in Kenya called Save the Elephants.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/world/asia/huge-ivory-stash-is-discovered-in-malaysia.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

European Union Proposes Overhaul of Fisheries Policy

But environmentalists said that the plan did not address the overcapacity of the bloated European fleet.

Maria Damanaki, the European Union’s commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, said in Brussels that the changes were needed because scientific models suggested that only eight of 136 fish stocks in European Union waters would be at sustainable levels in 2022 if no action were taken.

The aim is to secure both fish stocks and fishermen’s livelihood for the future while putting an end to overfishing and depletion of fish stocks, she said.

“If we don’t make structural changes to the way we do business now,” she said, “we will lose one fish stock after the other. I want to break this vicious circle.”

Ms. Damanaki said the introduction of tradable fishing rights, which would be imposed at the national rather than the European Union level, would put responsibility for safeguarding fish stocks with the industry and help reduce overcapacity.

But scientists and conservationists were skeptical that privatizing fish stocks was the solution.

“It’s absolutely not clear how they intend to allocate the rights in the first place,” said Markus Knigge, a fisheries policy adviser to the Pew Environment Group. “What you want is for the most ecologically sustainable fisheries to end up with the rights.”

“The fear is that they won’t even say you have to take environmental and social factors into consideration,” Mr. Knigge added, “but rather just hand over the rights to those who have been overfishing.”

Europeche, an organization of national European fishing organizations, has noted that “opinions are divided on the appropriateness of using transferable fishing rights,” with small-scale coastal fisheries fearing that large fishing companies will crowd them out.

The proposal Wednesday was notable for what it did not contain: any measure to directly reduce the overcapacity in the European fleet.

A previous report to the European Commission had identified the mismatch between fleet and fish as the most important issue to be addressed.

“Trading around fishing quotas won’t stop overfishing, especially without a clear pathway to bring the fleet size in line with how much fish is left in the sea,” Saskia Richartz, a fisheries policy adviser at Greenpeace, said in a statement.

Critics of Europe’s fisheries policy say that much of the problem comes from the subsidies the industry receives, well over 1 billion euros (about $1.39 billion) a year, according to Fishsubsidy.org, with Spain’s fleet alone getting about half.

They say the subsidies — in the form of tax breaks on diesel fuel and aid for building, modernizing and scrapping vessels — results in too many boats to chase too few fish, and leaves the industry dependent on public largess.

Another measure proposed on Wednesday would eliminate rules requiring the discarding of bycatch, or valuable species taken incidentally. The move to end the wasteful practice was welcomed by both the fishing industry and conservationists, who hope it will result in the use of more selective techniques to catch the target fish.

The bycatch issue has recently become the subject of a television campaign led by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a British celebrity chef, who has collected nearly 700,000 signatures of support for ending the current practice.

Opponents claim that current European Union rules lead to as much as 50 percent of the entire catch being dumped backed into the ocean — dead — because fishing operators are not allowed to land species for which they have already met their quotas.

Conservationists welcomed a proposal that all fish stocks are “to be brought to sustainable levels by 2015,” in line with the bloc’s international commitments. But skepticism remains there as well because fishing decisions in Europe tend to be made on political rather than scientific grounds, and many national governments lack the will to enforce regulations.

The proposal, part of a once-a-decade review of the bloc’s Common Fisheries Policy, may require a year or more of negotiation and consultation before being adopted.

The European Commission strongly backs the measures, officials say, and the final rules are expected to be largely in line with the current plan.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=35eb137c2688326a57189fc4cb5d1d15

Huge Ivory Stash Is Seized in Malaysia

European Union Proposes Overhaul of Fisheries Policy

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