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Listening to BBC News the other night I learned about the following:
1. 95 %decline in elephant population during the past century in Africa due to illegal poaching (i.e., kill elephant for their tusks)
2. The poachers get US$50/kg for the tusks
3. The total retail value of these tusks on the world market is US$90 million with China and Vietnam the major importers
4. While there are laws against exporting elephant tusk from Africa, and as I recallalso laws against import of elephant tusk by China, corruption by and bribes to custom officials on both side are rampant.
From these reports one can deduce some conclusions:
A. Wikipedia information on total number of elephants killed in Africa to be 30,000 per year estimated. It won’t take long before elephants will be extinct. And this will be a tragedy according to the World Wildlife Fund.
B. Some of the import to Vietnam probably are in turn smuggled cross the Vietnam-Yunanborder into China. It is difficult to imagine a large demand for ivory in Vietnam comparable to China.
C. I estimate a pair of elephant tusks to beabout 40 kgs. This means African countries receives a total of US$66 M for exporting the 30,000+ tusks.
D.Take the sixty-six Million dollars as material cost and using the usual production multiplier of 2 give a retail value of 132 Million dollars which is consistent with the independently reported retail figure of 90 million dollars (my guesstimate of 40Kg/pair of tusk may be little off).
E. This means somewhere between 30-66 million dollars are used for bribing custom official.
F. The poachers claim this is a victimless crime except for the elephants and elephants are destroying neighboring farms. For survival they are justified in doing the killing. Besides why is this different from killing of ox, sheep and chicken due to demand for human consumption (of course these animals are not going extinct due to breeding).
This state of affairs will continue since no one considers this as important in the great scheme of world affairs. How many people care if elephants become extinct when they are worried about their own survival or ivory collectors for their own pleasure. Readers can draw their own conclusions about this.
Note added 5/5/2016: See earlier related article of mine http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-792043.html
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