Ivory
Power and Poaching in Africa
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Half of Tanzania's elephants have been killed for their ivory since 2007. A similar alarming story can be told of the herds in northern Mozambique and across swathes of central Africa, with forest elephants losing almost two-thirds of their numbers to the tusk trade. The huge rise in poaching and ivory smuggling in the new millennium has destroyed the hope that the 1989 ivory trade ban had capped poaching and would lead to a long-term fall in demand. But why the new upsurge? The answer is not simple. Since ancient times, large-scale killing of elephants for their tusks has been driven by demand outside Africa's elephant ranges - from the Egyptian pharaohs through Imperial Rome and industrialising Europe and North America to the new wealthy business class of China. And, who poaches and why do they do it? In recent years lurid press reports have blamed mass poaching on rebel movements and armed militias, especially Somalia's Al Shabaab, tying two together two evils - poaching and terrorism. But does this account stand up to scrutiny? This new and ground-breaking examination of the history and politics of ivory in Africa forensically examines why poaching happens in Africa and why it is corruption, crime and politics, rather than insurgency, that we should worry about.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Somerville (Africa's Long Road Since Independence) examines the 21st century's persistent and illegal ivory trade in the face of the failure of the 1989 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Since 9/11, many Western governments and NGOs have viewed the ivory trade as intimately connected to the funding of insurgent groups throughout Africa. Somerville believes this framing obscures a long history of governmental corruption and ignores real frustration about local land-use policy in East and Southern Africa. He asserts that locally workable, sustainable-use solutions, rather than NGO-mediated antipoaching measures, will ensure long-term elephant and human survival. Somerville's chronological, country-by-country narrative shows that the ivory trade has been externally driven since "the last millennium BCE." More recently, European colonial governments funded themselves through licensing, regulation, and exports, providing for "colonialism on the cheap" at the same time that indigenous hunting was severely restricted by wildlife-management programs. By the time African countries gained their independence, the structures and abuse of government systems and safari tourism were in place, and the smuggling trade well established. Those seeking to understand the political and economic complexity of the ivory trade will appreciate Somerville's clear analysis. Maps & tables.
